Transparency International, a non-governmental organization founded for the sake of combating corruption, published this week its “Corruption Perceptions Index” (CPI) covering the year 2023. 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. The report commented that results have been on the decline since the year 2016, on the back of the rise of authoritarianism in some countries, coupled with the fact that democratic governments resorted to not so democratic means to undermine judicial systems and restrict civic freedoms during their handling of crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. In this vein, 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: 65), while the worst performing region was Sub-Saharan Africa (average score: 33). The report noted that over the past couple of years, many countries such as Uzbekistan, Tanzania, and Ukraine have managed to record major improvements in their CPI scores while others like Sweden, Turkey, and the Guatemala have seen significant deterioration.

In figures, Denmark came in first place in the 2023 CPI with a score of 90, followed by both Finland (score of 87), New Zealand (score of 85), Norway (score: 84) and Singapore (score: 83).

As far as the Arab region is concerned, the United Arab Emirates reported the highest CPI score (68) among its peers during the year 2023, ranking 26^th in the world, followed by Qatar (score: 58; global rank: 40), Saudi Arabia (score: 52; global rank: 53), Jordan (score: 46; global rank: 63), and Bahrain (score: 42; global rank: 76). Conversely, war-torn and terrorism-stricken Arab nations namely, Libya (score: 18; global rank: 170), Yemen (score: 16; global rank: 176), Syria (score: 13; global rank: 177) and Somalia (score: 11; global rank: 180), were the worst performers on a regional level. The report mentioned that the Middle East and North Africa region’s score remained at its worst level of 38 as most countries in the region have failed to improve their scores due to the high levels of corruption.

On the local front, Lebanon ranked 149^th in the world in the 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index, gaining one position from the 150^th place it occupied in 2022 with its CPI score remaining unchanged at 24, the country’s lowest level since the inception of the index in 2001. Consequently, Lebanon occupied the 14^th place in the region, right after Mauritania (score: 30; global rank: 130) and ahead of Iraq (score: 23; global rank: 154) and Sudan (score: 20; global rank: 162).