Pakistan Less Corrupt This Year Than Before

According to the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) drawn up every year by the Transparency International (TI), Pakistan is the 40th most corrupt country in the world out of the 180 countries listed, an improvement from last year’s 14th most corrupt country out of 163 countries listed, and from 2005’s 11th most corrupt country from 159 countries listed.

I’ll be cynical and say I don’t think the improvement in the rankings is down to any sincere efforts on the part of the powers to be. They’re just a consequence of more countries being in the list this time. As Syed Adli Gilani, the chairman of Pakistan TI said, we still need “sincere efforts to apply rules and regulations across the board”.

Voice of America’s Steve Herman has a report here that shows how the entire South Asian region has fared poorly in the rankings, but it is also worth noticing how Pakistan has done in comparison to its regional neighbours. The military led Burma is ranked joined 180th with Somalia, making them the most corrupt nations in the world. Bangladesh ranks 162nd, a good seven spots below Nepal at 131. India is tied with China and six other countries at number 72 and ahead of Sri Lanka, which is at 94th position. Our troubled western neighbour Afghanistan is amongst the ten most corrupt nations in the world finding a place at 172 in the rankings.

New Zealand, Denmark and Finland were declared joined first as the least corrupt (or most ‘transparent’) countries in the world. Check out the entire list here (pdf link) and a visual summary of their findings here. Once again, TI have discovered that a positive correlation exists between corruption and poverty. Huguette Labelle, Chair of Transparency International said that “low sccoring countries need to take these results seriously and act now to strengthen accountability in public institutions” but that equally “action from top scoring countries is just as important, particularly in cracking down on corrupt activity in the private sector.”

As BD correctly points out at The Daily Salty, “corruption requires somebody to pay [bribes] and somebody to demand”. And much of this bribe money, according to TI, comes from “multinationals based in the world’s richest countries”. And as such, as Akere Muna, the Vice Chair of Transparency International says, “criticism by rich countries of corruption in poor ones has little credibility while their financial institutions sit on wealth stolen from the world’s poorest people”.

Incidently, two of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, the United States and United Kingdom, both don’t feature in the top 10. The United Kingdom is actually higher at no. 12 (in between France at 19 and Belgium at 21) while the United States is further down at no. 20 (below Japan at 17 and Hongkonk at 14). I wonder what the State Department (very fond of publishing reports about the status of various issues, such as minority rights, religious freedom, and so on in different countries in the world) has had to say on these rankings, if anything…

See Also: Harrison Bergeron at the Conservative Times has a thought provoking anecdote about the “perception” of corruption in Mexico along with a summary of TI’s findings in his own words.

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