Transparency International, a non-governmental organization founded for the sake of combating corruption, published this week its “Corruption Perceptions Index” (CPI) covering the year 2019. The index, which ranks 180 countries and territories across the globe based on their perceived level of public sector corruption, uses a scale of scores ranging between “0” (highly corrupted) and “100” (highly transparent) for 13 different data sources from 12 various institutions averaged to capture the perception of corruption over the past two years in each country. Major findings of the report revealed that the vast majority of countries are recording little or no progress in their attempts to end political corruption whereby most countries have either weak or non-existent finance regulation campaigns. In this vein, this year’s CPI results showed that more than two-thirds of countries and territories covered in the report scored below 50 with an average overall score of 43. Moreover, the best performing region was Western Europe (average score: 66), while the worst performing region was Sub-Saharan Africa (average score: 32). The report noted that since the year 2012, many countries such as Greece, Guyana, and Estonia have managed to record major improvements in their CPI scores while others like Canada, Nicaragua, and Australia have seen significant deterioration.

In figures, both Denmark and New Zealand topped the list of countries in the 2019 CPI with a score of 87, followed by Finland (score: 86) in the third place, and each of Singapore, and Sweden (score: 85) sharing the fourth position in the global rankings.

As far as the Arab region is concerned, the United Arab Emirates reported the highest CPI score (71) among its peers during the year 2019, ranking 21^st worldwide, followed by Qatar (score: 62; global rank: 30), Saudi Arabia (score: 53; global rank: 51), Oman (score: 52; global rank: 56) and Jordan (score: 48; global rank: 60). Conversely, war-torn and terrorism-stricken Arab nations namely, Iraq (score: 20; global rank: 162), Libya (score: 18; global rank: 168), Sudan (score: 16; global rank: 173), Yemen (score: 15; global rank: 177), Syria (score: 13; global rank: 178) and Somalia (score: 9; global rank: 180), were the worst performers on a regional level. The report mentioned that the Arab region faces “significant corruption challenges that highlight a lack of political integrity” whereby people in power take advantage of the lack of governance in their respective countries by routinely diverting “public funds to their own pockets at the expense of ordinary citizens”.

On the local front, Lebanon ranked 137^th in the world in the 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index, improving one position from the 138^th place it occupied in 2018 despite maintaining its CPI score unchanged at 28. This has placed Lebanon in the 13^th position regionally, right after Djibouti (score: 30; global rank: 126) and right before Mauritania (score: 28; global rank: 137). The report mentioned that nearly one in two Lebanese citizens are being bribed in return for their votes.