Denmark, New Zealand and Finland are seen as the least corrupt countries in the world and Somalia, Syria and South Sudan as the most corrupt while the US has been ranked outside the top 20 least corrupt countries for the first time since 2011.
They are among the findings of Transparency International’s 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index which measures public sector corruption in 180 nations and territories by giving each country a score out of 100 – zero equalling highly corrupt and 100 equalling very clean – based on 13 expert assessments and surveys of business executives.
The index gave the US an overall score of 71 out of 100, four points down on last year, a result which Zoe Reiter, the acting representative to the US at Transparency International, described as a “red flag”.
“[It] comes at a time when the US is experiencing threats to its system of checks and balances, as well as an erosion of ethical norms at the highest levels of power,” said Reiter in a statement. “If this trend continues, it would indicate a serious corruption problem in a country that has taken a lead on the issue globally. This is a bipartisan issue that requires a bipartisan solution.”
The data showed that two-thirds of all countries scored below 50 on the index with an average score of just 43. Transparency said that since 2012 only 20 countries have significantly improved their scores while in 16 nations, the scores had significantly declined.
The former include the Ivory Coast (now at number 150 with a score of 35), Estonia (18 with a score of 73), Senegal (67 with a score of 45) and Guyana (93 with a score of 37) while the latter include Australia (13 with a score of 77), Chile (27 with a score of 67) and Turkey (78 with a score of 41) and Mexico (138 with a score of 28).
