I would guess, it really depends how far you go. Protection money for running a small mom&pop shop selling kebab or souvenirs for tourists is probably less tha

I would guess, it really depends how far you go. Protection money for running a small mom&pop shop selling kebab or souvenirs for tourists is probably less than the protection money you pay for the same kinds of businesses to the government in Germany (percentage wise). But the more you want to scale the business and try to deal with higher and higher strata of gangs (all the way up to the national level), the more expensive it gets. And unpredictable. So my theory is - it is easy to start a micro-business in a corrupt environment, but it is hard to scale it.