Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Transparency International's Corruption Index

You may have seen reports of the release of Transparency International's 2007 Corruption Perceptions Index.

At the bottom of that press release is a link to a .pdf document of the rankings and the sources used to create the index.

These are statistics that students can analyze and compare with other statistics (from the CIA World Facctbook, perhaps; it publishes a number of rank order pages to compare with TI's index) to search for correlations between corruption and other political and economic indicators.

The press release begins with this note: "The divide in perceived levels of corruption in rich and poor countries remains as sharp as ever... Developed and developing countries must share responsibility for reducing corruption, in tackling both the supply and demand sides..."

The United Kingdom is tied with Luxembourg for 12th on the index, with a score of 8.4. (9.4 is the highest score shared by New Zealand, Denmark, and Finland.)
China and Mexico are tied with Morocco, Suriname, India, Peru, and Brazil for 72nd on the index. Their score is 3.5.
Iran is ranked 131st with a score of 2.5. It's tied with Yemen, the Philippines, Burundi, Libya, and Honduras.
Russia ranks 143rd on the list. Its score of 2.3 is the same as that of Gambia, Indonesia, and Togo.
That's just a bit ahead of Nigeria's 2.2, which ties it at 147th with Angola and Guinea-Bissau.

The most corrupt countries on the index are Somalia and Myanmar tied for 179th place with a score of 1.4.

Labels: corruption, governance, pedagogy, political culture, rule-of-law