Politics: Transparency International releases 2006 CPI

Global civil society organization Transparency International has today released their annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2006.

Again the CPI points to a strong correlation between corruption and poverty, with a concentration of impoverished states at the bottom of the list.

The 2006 CPI ranks 163 countries by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys. It scores countries on a scale from zero to ten, with zero indicating high levels of perceived corruption and ten indicating low levels of perceived corruption.

Transparency International says that comparisons from one year to another are problematic, countries with noteworthy increased levels of corruptions from CPI 2005 to CPI 2006 include Brazil, Cuba, Israel, Jordan, Laos, Seychelles, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia and the United States. In these cases, actual changes in perceptions occurred during the last two years.

Improvements could be observed from 2005 to 2006 for Algeria, Czech Republic, India, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Mauritius, Paraguay, Slovenia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uruguay.

While not intended to be used for these purposes, some governments are using the corruption scores from the CPI to determine which countries receive aid (and which don’t).

More information together with the full CPI report is available on the Transparency International web site