Crooked
Transparency International recently released its Corruptions Perception Index (CPI), a measure for assessing just how corrupt your country’s national government and public sector is perceived to be.
The index is based on a range of qualitative sources, all collated by Transparency International to eventually rank 180 countries, scoring them on a scale of 0 (crooked as they come) to 100 (clean as a whistle), based on how the nations fare in the public’s perception.
Overall, a vast majority (95%) of countries have made very little progress on tackling corruption in the last 5 years, with some major nations actually sliding down substantially. The UK is one of the most notable. In 2017 the country notched 82 on the index, a score which dropped to 73 in 2022, a year which saw Britain go through 3 prime ministers, all with their own political scandals. World Cup hosts Qatar also scored poorly, ranking 40th with a score of 58 — the lowest in the country’s history.
At the other end of the spectrum, the US did actually improve modestly, scoring 69 points up from a 10-year low of 67 in the last two years, placing it 24th on the CPI. Elsewhere, the Nordic countries performed well — as they so often do on global demographic rankings — with Denmark coming top, Finland second and Norway fourth.
At a regional level, the lowest scores came in Sub-Saharan Africa, where many countries like Somalia and South Sudan are struggling with violence and civil unrest, compounding the issue of corruption and eroding trust in the country’s institutions.
Go Deeper: Explore the full dataset.
