Corruption Perceptions Index

[4] The 2024 CPI, published in Febraury 2025, currently ranks 180 countries "on a scale from 100 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt)" based on the situation between 1 May 2023 and 30 April 2024.

[3]: 7 The goal of the data selection is to capture expert and business leader assessments of various public sector corruption practices.

In August 2009 I have informed Cobus de Swardt, managing director of TI, that I am no longer available for doing the Corruption Perceptions Index.

The working paper Corruption and Economic Growth: New Empirical Evidence[15] from 2019 emphasizes that many previous studies used the CPI for their analysis before 2012 (when the index was difficult to compare over time) and therefore may be biased.

The results show that corruption is negatively associated with economic growth (Real per capita GDP decreased by around 17% in the long-run when the reversed CPI increased by one standard deviation).

That indicates that in countries with high corruption, equal treatment before the law is not guaranteed and there is more space for discrimination against specific groups.

Furthermore, as noted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), justice systems around the world are overburdened with large caseloads, chronically underfunded, and in need of more financial and human resources to properly fulfill their mandates.

This, in combination with increasing outside interference, pressures and efforts to undermine judicial independence, results in the inability of justice systems to control corruption.

Countries with higher levels of corruption are less likely to sanction public officials for failing to adhere to existing rules and fulfill their responsibilities.

The local Transparency International chapter in Bangladesh disowned the index results after a change in methodology caused the country's scores to increase; media reported it as an "improvement".

It argues that the CPI embeds a powerful and misleading elite bias in popular perceptions of corruption, potentially contributing to a vicious cycle and at the same time incentivizing inappropriate policy responses.

[25] In the United States, many lawyers advise international businesses to consult the CPI when attempting to measure the risk of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations in different nations.

This practice has been criticized by the Minnesota Journal of International Law, which wrote that since the CPI may be subject to perceptual biases it therefore should not be considered by lawyers to be a measure of actual national corruption risk.

In contrast, the most significant improvements in the CPI score over the last twelve years were recorded by Uzbekistan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Ivory Coast, the Dominican Republic and Kuwait.

The advanced economies of Northern and Western Europe, North America, and Asia and the Pacific tend to top the rankings over the long term.

These nations also generally have well-functioning judicial systems, a strong rule of law, and political stability – all factors that contribute to perceptions of clean governance.

However, while these top-ranked countries have strong domestic institutions, their commitment to fighting corruption appears to be weak when it comes to their own financial systems and regulations affecting the international environment.

Despite a high CPI score, the Netherlands has a poor record of prosecuting companies that bribe foreign officials to win contracts, as seen in the Nigerian oil bribery case.

[31] The report Exporting Corruption 2022,[32] which assesses foreign bribery enforcement in 43 of the 44 signatories to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, as well as China, ZAO Hong Kong, India and Singapore, reinforces this concern.