Transparency International, a non-governmental organization founded for the sake of combating corruption, published this week its “Corruption Perceptions Index” (CPI) covering the year 2020. 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 have recorded little or no progress in their attempts to end political corruption over the past decade, while pinpointing that corruption has dented the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 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, Myanmar, and Ecuador have managed to record major improvements in their CPI scores while others like Lebanon, Malawi, and Bosnia & Herzegovina have seen significant deterioration.

In figures, both Denmark and New Zealand topped the list of countries in the 2020 CPI with a score of 88, followed by Finland, Singapore and Sweden (score: 85) sharing jointly the third place.

As far as the Arab region is concerned, the United Arab Emirates reported the highest CPI score (71) among its peers during the year 2020, ranking 21^st worldwide, followed by Qatar (score: 63; global rank: 30), Oman (score: 54; global rank: 49), Saudi Arabia (score: 53; global rank: 52) and Jordan (score: 49; global rank: 60). Conversely, war-torn and terrorism-stricken Arab nations namely, Iraq (score: 21; global rank: 160), Libya (score: 17; global rank: 173), Sudan (score: 16; global rank: 174), Yemen (score: 15; global rank: 176), Syria (score: 14; global rank: 178) and Somalia (score: 12; global rank: 179), were the worst performers on a regional level. The report mentioned that the Middle East and North Africa region is perceived as “highly corrupt”, displaying minimal progress to controlling corruption.

On the local front, Lebanon ranked 149^th in the world in the 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index, losing twelve positions from the 137^th place it occupied in 2019 with its CPI score dropping from 28 to 25. This has placed Lebanon in the 14^th position regionally, right after Djibouti (score: 27; global rank: 142) and right before Comoros (score: 21; global rank: 160). The report mentioned that notwithstanding the massive anti-corruption protests in October 2019, little progress has been achieved so far over this issue while indicating also that accountability for the Beirut port blast remains “limited”. The report, however, pointed out to some glimmers of hope, such as the adoption of a law to address dirty money, a bill to enhance access to information, and the nascent adoption of the National Anti-Corruption Strategy.