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TI Corruption Index: What you need to know

Storyline:Business, National News

Transparency International has released its 2017 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) placing Somalia in the bottom list alongside South Sudan and Syria while New Zealand and Denmark emerged as the least corrupt countries.

Somalia got a CPI of 9 and ranked number 180 while New Zealand was ranked number 1 with a CPI of 89. According to Transparency International, a country/territory’s score indicates the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of 0-100, where 0 means that a country is perceived as highly corrupt and a 100 means that a country is perceived as very clean.

A country’s rank indicates its position relative to the other countries/territories included in the index and may therefore change depending on the number of countries included in the index.

CPI is an indicator of perceptions of public sector corruption, that is administrative and political corruption and is therefore not on the levels of corruption of entire nations or societies, or of their policies, or the activities of their private sector.

To arrive at its verdict, TI relies on a range of institutions specialising in governance and business climate analysis. For the 2017 CPI report, TI drew data from 13 data sources from 12 independent institutions. The data published in the previous two years.

CPI source data captures the following aspects of corruption, based on the specific question wording used to collect the data:

  • Bribery
  • Diversion of public funds
  • Prevalence of officials using public office for private gain without facing consequences
  • Ability of governments to contain corruption and enforce effective integrity mechanisms in the public sector
  • Red tape and excessive bureaucratic burden which may increase opportunities for corruption
  • Meritocratic versus nepotistic appointments in the civil service
  • Effective criminal prosecution for corrupt officials
  • Adequate laws on financial disclosure and conflict of interest prevention for public officials
  • Legal protection for whistleblowers, journalists, investigators when they are reporting cases of bribery and corruption
  • State capture by narrow vested interests
  • Access of civil society to information on public affairs

CPI source data does not capture the following aspects of corruption:

  • Citizen perceptions or experience of corruption
  • Tax fraud
  • Illicit financial flows
  • Enablers of corruption (lawyers, accountants, financial advisors etc)
  • Money-laundering
  • Private sector corruption
  • Informal economies and markets

TI says CPI is based on perceptions because there is no indicator which measures objective national levels of corruption directly and exhaustively.

Find the list here: CPI2017_FullDataSet

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