And with respect to frequency, the most respected and
clearly the most well-known is the Corruption Perceptions Index
which is published every year by Transparency International.
Now, I love Transparency International, they're an amazing organization,
they are publishing the CPI later, and later, and later every year.
And so it is generally not until December that we get that year's iteration,
which is why I'm using Corruption Perceptions Index from 2015.
The Corruption Perceptions Index brings together sources such as risk evaluation,
survey, business polls, business evaluations,
government evaluations, competitiveness index.
And amalgamates them all into one comparable index.
It gives polities a score from 100, which would mean
that country was clean as could be, that there was no
perception of political corruption at all in that particular polity to zero.
Which means that there is a perception that every single interaction
involving that particular polity also involves corruption.
On this map, you can see by color code the scores
that various polities have gotten.
And the yellow would be the cleaner countries, the red and the dark red
would be those countries for which there's a perception of more corruption.
What you'll notice on this map is that there is lot of red.
Unfortunately, Transparency International reports that
around two-thirds of the polities that they measure and
they measure most of the polities in the world,
say about two-thirds are either corrupt or endemically corrupt.
And we can break that down and take a look at some of the countries at the top,
in the middle, and the bottom.
The top, you tend to have countries like Singapore, Scandinavian countries,
Canada and they are coming in with scores in the 90s and
the high 80s, down to Uruguay which is really taking care of
a lot of these kind of issues, which gets a score of around 74.
The middle is always very interesting, because we are looking for the point out
of 170 or so countries in any given year, the number varies every year.
We're looking for the point at which we get the score of 50.
Above 50 means a polity is perceived to be cleaner than it is corrupt.
Below 50 means that a country is perceived to be more corrupt than it is clean.
And for this year that comes in at around 54.
So 54 countries are cleaner than they are corrupt.
And from 54 to 170 or so, I think this year it's a 167,
countries are perceived to be more corrupt than they are clean.
A lot more polities are perceived to be more corrupt than
they are clean, and that's true every single year.
We get down to the bottom of the table, of the index for this year and
we see scores like 8, 11, 12, 15.
When we're talking about scores like that,
we're talking about a perception that there's
an extremely high frequency of corruption.
Now, Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index
reached the entire polity.
But of course, the frequency of corruption is lumpy.