Berlin: Countries like Hungary and Turkey are growing more corrupt as they become more autocratic, and threats to the American system of checks and balances have knocked the US out of the top 20 ‘cleanest’ countries, according to a closely watched annual survey by Watchdog group Transparency International which was released Tuesday.
REPORT’S FINDINGS
- With a score of 71, the US lost four points over 2017 and dropped out of the top 20 nations for the first time since 2011, signalling a red flag
- With massive public mobilisation against corruption coupled with significant political participation India marginally improve its score to 41 from 40 in 2017
Watchdog group Transparency International said its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2018 showed more than two-thirds of countries scoring below 50, on its scale where 100 is very clean and zero is very corrupt.
With a score of 71, the US lost four points over 2017 and dropped out of the top 20 nations for the first time since 2011.
“A four point drop in the CPI score is a red flag and comes at a time when the US is experiencing threats to its system of checks and balance, as well as an erosion of ethical norms at the highest levels of power,” the Berlin-based organisation said.
The report said that India improved a point and rose three positions up in the index. India marginally improve its score to 41 (from 40 in 2017), and its position to 78 out of 180 countries in 2018 against 2017’s 81st, where it had slid from 79 in 2016.
Listing India along with Malaysia (47), Maldives (31), Pakistan (33) among the countries in the Asia-Pacific region “that will be important to watch moving forward,” the report said that in “all four countries, massive public mobilisation against corruption coupled with significant political participation and voter turnout resulted in new governments that promise extensive anti-corruption reforms”.
In a cross-analysis of its survey with global democracy data, Transparency said a link could be drawn between corruption and the health of a democracy.
Full democracies scored an average of 75 on the corruption index, flawed democracies averaged 49, and autocratic regimes averaged 30, the organization said.
The report cited Freedom House’s annual democracy survey, noting Turkey was downgraded from ‘partly free’ to ‘not free,’ while Hungary registered its lowest score for political rights since the fall of communism in 1989.
Overall, Denmark led the survey as the least corrupt nation, with a score of 88, followed by New Zealand, Finland and Singapore.
Somalia was rated the most corrupt with a score of 10.
