The United States, for example, dropped from the 19th spot last year to 22nd out of 178 countries this year, with their index also falling by 0.4 points.
The U.K., ranked 20th, posted an all-time low score of 7.6, a slight slip from last year’s 7.7, but a huge fall from their rating of 8.6 four years ago.
The countries least perceived as corrupt, according to TI’s analysis, are New Zealand and Denmark, which have held on to top spots since 1995. TI is an international nongovernmental organization founded in 1993 that is dedicated to fighting corruption, according to its website.
TI’s assessments encompass corrupt practices in the both public and private sectors. The 2010 CPI comes from different analysts' conclusions and business opinion surveys carried out by 10 independent institutions around the world between January 2009 and September 2010.
TI says that corruption itself is difficult to measure. At the same time it underlines that such phenomena as scandals, investigations, or prosecutions reflect less on the prevalence of corruption in a country, but more on such factors as press freedom or the efficiency of the judicial system.
Countries with recent histories of war and strife continued to dominate the bottom of the list with Somalia at the very bottom of the heap and Afghanistan, Iraq, and Burma just slightly above it. Somalia, an extremely poor country, is known as the “producer of pirates” who continue to capture ships passing by in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. International maritime forces and Somali authorities have been mostly ineffective at reigning in the lawlessness.
The CPI indicates that perceived corruption levels in Russia continue to rise. The Russian Federation is tied with such countries as Tajikistan, Cambodia, and Laos in its CPI. Russia dropped from 146th to 154th place compared to last year.
Georgia, which fought a short-term war with Russia in 2008, was placed at 68 on the index. Among European countries, the lowest ranked was Ukraine finishing at 134th, up from 146th last year.
The CPI also fell for the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Madagascar, and Niger.
Overall, the 2010 rankings do not show any major changes compared to last year’s report.
“These results signal that significantly greater efforts must go into strengthening governance across the globe,” Huguette Labelle, chairwoman of Transparency International said in a statement.
“With the livelihoods of so many at stake, governments’ commitments to anti-corruption, transparency and accountability must speak through their actions,” she added.
