THURSDAY, 3.30PM
SOUTH Africa is the 33rd most corrupt country out of 52 nations surveyed by Transparency International this year.
Transparency International’s corruption perception index is based on seven international surveys of businesspeople, political analysts and the general public, and ranks countries out of 10, with the least corrupt gaining the most points.
No country managed a score of 10, but Denmark, Finland and Sweden ranked as the top three least corrupt countries, with Nigeria ranking as the world’s most corrupt for the second year running.
Points awarded to some countries were: Denmark, 9,94; Finland, 9,48; Sweden, 9,35; New Zealand, 9,23; Australia, 8,86; United Kingdom, 8,22; France, 6.66; Italy, 5,03; South Africa, 4,95; China, 2,88; Russia, 2,27; and Nigeria, 1,76.
German university economist Dr Johann Graf Lambsdorff, who developed the CPI, said only 52 countries qualified for inclusion in the index because it relied on a minimum of four surveys per country do determine the ranking. “Given that there are almost 200 sovereign states in the world today, it is certain that there are many countries that may be perceived as even more corrupt than those listed on the CPI, but we do not have sufficient informatuion to rank them all,” he said.
Lambsdorff stressed that by drawing on the Gallup International survey, the CPI also included opinions from the general public for the first time, which made the index less biased against developing countries than in its first two years, when the index was solely based on the perceptions of foreign businesspeople, most of them from Western industrialised countries.