Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Corruption perception in Latin America

Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perception Index.  Of interest is the fact that Chile is perceived as less corrupt than the United States (though both are within a similar "confidence range" so the ranking is not as precise as it appears).  The Latin American Herald Tribune also notes that despite all its problems, Ecuador has improved significantly.  Meanwhile, Venezuela is near the bottom of the list again, though I must say that regardless of how corrupt the public sector is, I have a hard time believing it is more corrupt than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and virtually the same as Sudan.

With all the error that can be introduced into them, such surveys do of course need to be taken with a grain of salt.  In fact, the regional director for the Americas said the following:


For its part, Cuba, which historically has been among the least corrupt nations in Latin America, fell from its 4.4 points last year to 3.7, and dropped eight places to No. 69.
In that regard, Salas urged a certain caution, since the sources consulted provide contradictory figures and the result could be due to a “technical” matter.


That could apply to any country, so an unspecified "technical" matter could move countries up and down.

1 comments:

leftside 1:51 PM  

For an organization so concerned with transparency, it is more than a little troubling that an "unspecified" (ie. not publicly known) technical matter can have such importance effects.

But this should not surprise anyone who pays attention to the ups and downs of their rankings. They clearly work for their political and money masters, which means demeaning Venezuela, Cuba and others who don't "play nice" with multinationals.

Check out this expose by Oil Wars blog on the nonsense they tried to peddle about PDVSA. Incompetence and lies, combined with a political agenda is not a good recipe.

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