In Russia and Italy how strong of a role does corruption play in
international business?

By this i mean: how strongly does it effect things like Foreign Direct Investment?
Can you describe to me the level of corruption in these counties?

Hello Hughbert.  Thank you for an interesting question on a very
complex topic.

I'm providing some information below that directly gets to your
question about the "levels of corruption" in different countries, and
briefly describes the impacts of corruption.  But if anything here
seems to require elaboration, please don't hesitate to post a Request
for Clarification before rating this answer.

A group called Transparency International has made corruption its
cause celebre, and publishes an annual corruption index for over 100
countries.  A summary of their latest report can be found here:

http://www.transparency.org/pressreleases_archive/2002/2002.08.28.cpi.en.html

and the actual table of country-by-country corruption scores is here:

http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2002/cpi2002.en.html


As you can see from the table, Russia achieves a fairly low score of
2.7, while Italy faired better with a score of 5.2 (barely considered
a passing grade by Transparency International, who report results
above and below a score of 5).

Bangladesh has the lowest score of 1.2, while Finland (ah...the
Finns!) scored 9.7 out of 10.  The U.S. -- with very strong
anti-corruption laws in theory, and a wave of recent corporate and
financial scandals in practice -- scored a middling 7.7.

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So what does this all mean in terms of impacts.  Investors are wary of
diving into corruption-ridden countries with new money.  The World
Bank has studied this issue extensively, and has concluded that
corruption depresses the level of FDI; steers what FDI there is
towards larger, well-established firms, and particularly impacts
investments from the U.S., since the U.S. is one of the few countries
of the world that makes it a crime to participate in bribery in
overseas operations.

Some of the key World Bank reports on this topic are:

Corruption and Composition of Foreign Direct Investment:
Firm-Level Evidence

http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/pdf/wps2360.pdf

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State Capture, Corruption and Misgovernance: Empirical Findings

http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/assessing/pdf/kaufmann_statecapture.pdf

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Corruption and Cross-Border Investment: Firm-Level Evidence 

http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/LAC/LACInfoClient.nsf/d29684951174975c85256735007fef12/3eede04f45c4da3c85256c670055a423/$FILE/Wei%20Corruption%20and%20Cross%20Border%20Investment.pdf.

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FDI International Survey

http://www.miga.org/screens/pubs/otherpubs/FDIsurvey.pdf

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I hope this information meets your needs, but as I said earlier, just
post a Request for Clarification if I can provide any additional
assistance.

As to the antique market Russian corruption has a unbelievable
influence, from delivering master pieces from all over Russia like
museums libraries and kremlins storages [non the less from where did
it come originally..?] recently it has been estimated that over 40,000
ancient pieces was lost
As you may know we are referring to multibillion dollar market.
Just my knowledge.
The Incunabula collector

I am aware this question is quite an old one. However, I would like to
add that the aformentioned listing has been funded by the countries
which came in first, second and you guessed it third.