We introduce a bounded domain version V 2 (BD) of Buss's second order theory V 2 of bounded arithmetic and show that this version is equivalent to the rst order theory S 3 : More precisely, we construct two natural interpretations V 3 and S 2 (BD) which are inverse to each other and preserve the syntactic structure of bounded formulae. As a corollary, for the bounded domain case we obtain Buss's result concerning 1 -expressibility in V 2 as a direct consequence of his main result for rst order theories. Using only plain corollaries of the cut elimination theorem, we show that V 2 (BD) prove the same formulae where 8 stand for rst order quanti ers. Combined with the above mentioned result this gives an alternative proof of Buss's characterization of 2 functions. All this readily extends to the case V k (BD) vs. S k+1 (i; k 1).