How Corrupt Is Your Country?

Chlidonias

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I saw an article in the newspaper today about the release of the 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index by the organisation Transparency International. The reason it was in the paper was because New Zealand is (again) the least-corrupt country on Earth. Yay for us.

The link to the site is here: Corruption Perceptions Index 2017

This year’s Corruption Perceptions Index highlights that the majority of countries are making little or no progress in ending corruption, while further analysis shows journalists and activists in corrupt countries risking their lives every day in an effort to speak out.


The index, which ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople, uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. This year, the index found that more than two-thirds of countries score below 50, with an average score of 43. Unfortunately, compared to recent years, this poor performance is nothing new.


This year, New Zealand and Denmark rank highest with scores of 89 and 88 respectively. Syria, South Sudan and Somalia rank lowest with scores of 14, 12 and 9 respectively. The best performing region is Western Europe with an average score of 66. The worst performing regions are Sub-Saharan Africa (average score 32) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (average score 34).


Since 2012, several countries significantly improved their index score, including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and the United Kingdom, while several countries declined, including Syria, Yemen and Australia.



There is a table on the page with a list of all the countries and territories and their ratings for the years 2017 back to 2012 (New Zealand and Denmark have been in the top two places every year, often with matching ratings, although this year's ratings for the two countries are lower than all the preceding years - 89 and 88 this year versus 90 or 91 in other years, and 92 in the one year that Denmark was at top place).
 
Well my country is in 8th place which is pretty good. It seems like Canada hovers between the 6 and 10 range of every list on anything.
 
Surprised that Spain is only at 42th place, with all the corruption made by Catalonia...
 
There are so many people living in Luxembourg!

Anyway my country(?) is in thirteen place.Quite good but a bit higher than i thought.
 
The United States ties two European nations for 16th place. Our score (75) on the scorecard has only varied by one or two points over the years listed (2012-2107).

The reason we rank so highly (and I assume the reason for other high ranking nations) is that there are safeguards built into the political system that make it difficult for any one individual to abuse it to a far degree (though there is certainly abuse to a lesser degree).
 
It's quite interesting comparing the different years for the countries. Most are quite stable, varying up or down by a point or two.

The UK has made huge gains since 2012 (74 in 2012, rising steadily to 82 in 2017). Australia is the opposite, falling dramatically from 85 in 2012 to 81 in 2013 and continuing to fall every year since. Sweden dropped from 88 in 2016 to 84 in 2017.

It makes one wonder what has happened in these countries to cause such changes in results.
 
Something of interest that I noticed on the map is that they've drawn a border separating Somalia and Somaliland. I wonder why they've done that.
 
Something of interest that I noticed on the map is that they've drawn a border separating Somalia and Somaliland. I wonder why they've done that.

Interestingly they don't have a separate rating for Somaliland, but Somaliland has de facto been an independent country for about 20 years, though this is not officially recognized by other governments.
 
Interestingly they don't have a separate rating for Somaliland, but Somaliland has de facto been an independent country for about 20 years, though this is not officially recognized by other governments.

It's still quite unusual for Somaliland to be marked on maps as if it's a fully recognised country though.

I wonder what basis the countries on that map were decided on. It's clearly not just the UN because it includes ratings for Kosovo and Taiwan and nothing for minor city states (Monaco or Liechtenstein) and both Western Sahara and Palestine are marked on that map but in grey and are not in the list of countries at the bottom (Brunei is in grey too, but it is included in the list of countries below the map with a score of N/A).
 
The reason we rank so highly (and I assume the reason for other high ranking nations) is that there are safeguards built into the political system that make it difficult for any one individual to abuse it to a far degree (though there is certainly abuse to a lesser degree).

It's not just the political system - they state the ranking is for the whole public sector - so any one that works for federal or state governments, like police,customs officials, park rangers etc.

:p

Hix
 
I live in Denmark, so a second place for us. Not bad and fortunately not surprising either. You'll probably find many Danes who claim that we have a lot corrupt politicians, but that's the typical and deeply infantile "politicians are scumbags just because they're politicians" rhetoric, and in practice the problem isn't very big. Police corruption is also very rare.
 
It's not just the political system - they state the ranking is for the whole public sector - so any one that works for federal or state governments, like police,customs officials, park rangers etc.

:p

Hix
That's a good thing because I work for the federal government!
 
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