Transparency International releases its 2011 Corruption Perception Index

On 1 December 2011, Transparency International, the global anti-corruption civil society organisation ("TI"), released its 2011 Corruption Perception Index ("CPI").

The CPI provides an indication of perceived levels of public sector corruption in 183 countries and territories, scoring these from 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean). For these purposes, TI defines corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.

The scores are based on data from 17 different assessments and business opinion surveys that consider factors such as enforcement of anti-corruption laws, bribery of public officials and access to information, gathered between December 2009 and September 2011. Countries and territories are only included in the CPI when three or more of the data sources have assessed that area, such that inclusion in the index is dependent on there being sufficient information available.

The CPI is based on perception since corruption is a mostly hidden activity and therefore difficult to measure. The CPI has become a widely-used indicator of geographical corruption risk, in the context of risk assessments when identifying potential business opportunities in new markets, or when developing "adequate procedures" for the purposes of the UK Bribery Act 2010. A score of less than 5.1 is commonly treated as an indicator of high risk in this regard. This year, over two-thirds of the countries and territories assessed were given a score below 5. The UK was ranked 16th with a score of 7.8.

The 2011 CPI report can be found here and please click here to access the full results on the CPI website.

Please click here for our previous Law-Now on TI's Bribe Payers' Index 2011.

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The original publication date for this article was 02/12/2011.