Corruption Perceptions Index 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Corruption Perceptions Index 2013

transparency.org

64 pointslostbit60 comments

If you're a cynic then the key goes from cheap (dark colored countries) to expensive (lighter colored countries) corruption.

Italy seems to be an outlier in this respect: faring worse than Portugal, Spain and Turkey.

Chile and Uruguay seem to be perceived as less corrupt as their GDP per capita would lead you to think.

I think we need a scatterplot!

With flags: http://imgur.com/Ld0bXTO

With names: http://imgur.com/vX7dsTV

This is not a surprise, though. While I'm not Italian myself, I can attest that Italy (more specifically: The south of Italy) has a Europe-wide reputation for corruption.

It seems that things have been getting better lately, or maybe the perception of corruption in Italy was overblown.

Who knows?

Anyway, with this in mind, I'd take the color of Italy as a positive sign, namely that it is not too dark, on its way to yellow bliss.

Very cool, and illuminating. I'm actually a little surprised to see that lower corruption correlates so well with higher income. Admittedly, I could believe that part of that is a self selecting phenomena - IE, people with money immigrate to non-corrupt places. It may also be that alot of the money that's corrupting the cheap places is flowing from the wealthy ones.

First of all this is perceived corruption and not corruption.

Secondly I think it's fairly trivial that often corruption is borne out of a need. I think people emigrate a lot less than you'd think.

On the first, the implied assumption is that perceived corruption correlates reasonably well to actual. (I haven't proven)

Don't disagree with the general second statement. Sure, corruption can come about because of an unmet need. It's market forces at work when the market won't respond. But the implied point that the higher per capita income results in less met needs doesn't seem intuitively obvious, since purchasing power often rises at near parity with PC Income. Several places perceived as corrupt on this list actually have better purchasing power per (money unit) than the US.

I believe corruption and poverty have a circular cause-effect relationship. Corruption causes poverty (by moving money into the pockets of the corrupt) and prevents people from raising economically, forcing many to become corrupt themselves (when your only option of making middle- or upper-class money are bribes and theft).

I don't understand how you're pricing corruption like this. The Chinese get a discount on their corruption? What does that mean?

Yep a given unit of corruption costs more in lighter countries! Lets use the metric of a parking ticket. To bribe your way out of a parking ticket in China might cost RMB100 but $16 won't buy you squat in the US. In fact you'd have to pay way more than the face value of a ticket to get it cleared. Also let's say you want to get away with murder, well that's about 100K parking tickets worth of bribery, but it's much more affordable in the darker countries than in the light.

That's not inconsistent nor particularly cynical. It's Econ 101: if you make something more expensive, all else being equal there will be less of it.

The only one there that doesn't line up with my perceptions is Chile. I went there this time last year and their police and officials were nothing but transparent and professional. The fact that it isn't the same color as Canada must primarily be due to a general bias against South America as a whole.

Or that you were in a certain part of Chile that is run well.

Or may be things are just uneven..

While officials in touch with foreigners in Santiago are clean, it could be that it's less the case at the local BMV in remote town..

I wasn't just in Santiago, I hit Valparaiso, Pichilemu, some small towns I cannot remember near the mountains and the sea.

It might be different in different part of public administration.

I spend time in Transylvania, Romania. I love to be here for the food, the people and the nature (there is a certain lack of seas, sadly).

That said, the country is a corrupt piece of sh-t. (I like to say: "The Romanians should shoot more than two politicians next time.")

But the police seems quite good. The rest of the justice systems (courts etc) are said to be a horror story that would need a plutoon of Kafkas to describe.

1 (your experience) is not a very good sample for a statistical study :)

A bias against South America by the people who are reporting their perceptions of corruption in their own countries?

Not a bias, corruption runs way too deep:

Elected Mexican president spent 12 times above the limit!:

Limit: 26 million

Spent: USD $460 million!

http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=367033

Note the Per Capita Income vs Corruption scatter plots in a different post. Chiles actually one of the least corrupt for its income level. In fact, its generally not that corrupt. Approx = to the US (whether that's good or bad). In general I'd agree, although I'd think these stats would be thrown off by Santiago.

It has a pretty similar score to the US, I haven't personally observed police corruption here, have you?

(Obviously it goes on, I'm talking about first-hand perception)

Yeah I actually have seen US corruption a couple times. Unprofessional treatment at the border multiple times, unprofessional police officers during routine road stops, I worked for a company that needed their supercontractor to pay off a Senator to get a contract, etc.

Chile's a bright light by South American standards, it's true - but there's more to corruption in society than the behavior of officials.

For instance, there's more nepotism and cronyism in Chile's private sector than there is in Canada, which reduces the economic mobility of ordinary Chileans.

This appears goofy.

"The 2012 CPI draws on 13 different surveys and assessments from 12 different institutions. The institutions are the African Development Bank, the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, Global Insight, International Institute for Management Development, Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, Political Risk Services, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank and the World Justice Project." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index)

Alex Cobham's Foreign Policy article explains it reflects "the opinions of an internationally focused elite, typically from a corporate background and perhaps a similar education". Preferable are alternatives where "a group of a country's citizens are considered instead of restricting the view to elite perceptions only". (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/07/22/corrupting_...)

I was about to argue that institutions like Freedom House are ideologically biased but then I realized that each of the institutions have very different biases.

May be I should download the brochure to learn more about the methodology but some of the countries at the bottom seem weird.

North Korea is last ? Is there even room for corruption in the North Korean public sector ? I imagine it being arbitrary and all sort of things but I wouldn't dare attempting to bribe a North Korean official.

Does Somalia even have a public sector ?

It's a list of perceived corruption, not of corruption.

I know that(I've lived in countries that were at the time last on the list).

But did they survey North Koreans to discuss said perception ? Is "corrupt" really an equivalent of "bad and arbitrary and awfully run" ?

To me those are two different things.

Corruption is a vague term that describes a whole spectrum of behaviors. I don't know much about NK, but I grew up in a country with planned economy and the most visible aspect of corruption there was rampant bribery. It looks like NK has problems with this too: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/NG13Dg01.html

The Brochure is only one page and has no information about methodology. The most info I could find was "The CPI reflects the views of observers from around the world, including experts living and working in the countries and territories evaluated." from http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/in_detail

I'll stand in line for a TL;DR of the methodology. Another thing bothering me is that corruption perception is somewhat relative. In some countries it is normal behaviour to bribe police agents or administration employees. It comes with the job, as a perk and is hardly considered as corruption. This is less likely to change the ranks of the countries, rather the dynamic of the perceived corruption levels.

Re north Korea, it has an endemic amount of tolerated black market. There have been numerous articles on it.

Ok but is it similar to the Black Market that existed in the 80's in the USSR or closer to the late 90's in Cuba ?

If it's the first case, it's argue that the most corrupt rank isn't deserved. If it's the latter, we're getting close but we're still far from places like Guinea-Bissau.

I recall reading about bribery in North Korea fairly often. I mean, as a foreigner I'm sure it wouldn't get you there, but if you actually live there it sounds fairly common to use bribery to get better jobs, access to schooling, food, or what have you.

A lawyer is posting an open letter (plea) asking the king of Saudi Arabic to stop the theft of millions by a Saudi billionaire, yet no western media outlet dares to write about one of the most corrupt states here.(Arabic) link to the desperate plea http://www.alweeam.com.sa/259063/%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B4%D8%B7-%D...

Makes me want to move the denmark :)

One day, there will be a Danish startup on "Who's hiring".

You might have to wait a while. Denmark has a very strong "nobody ever got fired contracting IBM" business culture. There are one or two consultancies in Copenhagen that I'm aware of that my friends work at and could recommend. Most startups there seem to be design outfits. I'm told incorporating there is hard but didn't seem so to me from the requirements I read - you just need a lot of money available at the outset just to employ anyone (that's a positive, imo).

Anyway, there's starting to be some changes there - IBM missed a big contract or two with large clients to smaller outfits. Between that shift and the quality grads coming out of DTU, there may be some tech opportunities there if anyone starts investing money that way.

I would _love_ to go work over there but I doubt I could meet the requirements and I'm not lucky enough to have an EU citizenship.

There's lots of cool start-up culture in Denmark. (Podio, Zendesk, Zyb, etc)

While the system isn't always too kind to start-ups (high tax etc) they still do exist.

I've been working as a developer in Denmark for 7 years now (currently Xamarin) and haven't had a problem finding interesting projects.

While the system isn't always too kind to start-ups (high tax etc)

Actually, apart from high personal income tax, Denmark is one of the most business-friendly countries in the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391268

There are lots of Danish startups: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391809

I would _love_ to go work over there but I doubt I could meet the requirements and I'm not lucky enough to have an EU citizenship.

I think there are company-sponsored visas available. You should try contacting one of the Danish companies you're interested in working for. They're always hiring.

If you are looking for more established companies I would suggest LEGO [1] and Danfoss [2]. You can find many positions on their sites that could be interesting for HN crowd.

[1] http://jobs.lego.com/en-us/searchpage

[2] http://jobs.danfoss.com/jobs/

And Denmark is a Microsoft-land as far I know. So keep that in mind.

I think Microsoft does Dynamics NAV development in Denmark. NB NAV is their mid-range ERP application - nothing to do with Navigation!

And Denmark is a Microsoft-land as far I know.

For startups, no. There's as large an open source scene here as anywhere else. Ruby on Rails was started by a Dane (David Heinemeier Hansson), as was PHP, C++, and the V8 JavaScript engine used in Node.

IIRC, RedHat has a presence in Copenhagen. On the other hand, from what I understand, the government policy about open source is best summarized as "the less the better".

Not sure what you mean by that. The government is generally open to open source (http://digitaliser.dk/resource/2320552), but the two biggest providers of governmental web services don't really use open source. But why is that relevant if you want to seek employment in a Danish private company or start your own company in Denmark?

Well, it's just quite a different attitude from what you get in France, for instance, where, eg, the gendarmes use open source heavily. I'm not quite sure what you want to show with your report, by the way. That the governmental Danish IT department is considering open source as a way of saving cost? I did find this [1] though, which seems to back your position, but at the municipal level.

1: http://opensource.com/government/13/2/danish-municipalities-...

It's a nice place to be, though it can be hard to get close to the natives, as confirmed by about everybody in my Danish course.

On a totally unrelated note, if there is any HNer in the Århus area, I could totally agree to a get-together.

Hello there! I've got email in my profile. Maybe we can organize something!

As others here have noted, this doesn't seem to be measuring corruption. Instead, and after reading their meager "methodology" (we compile these results from "international elite"), it appears that what this is measuring instead is a country's business friendliness.

And that's a fine thing to measure, but don't call it "corruption". It does a disservice to us in fundamentally corrupt yet business-friendly countries.

It's the Corruption Perception Index, not the Absolute Corruption Index.

Debate the semantics of the word "corruption" as much as you want, but the index is found to have a strong correlation with black market activity and an "overabundance of regulation or unnecessary restriction of business activity". [1]

That doesn't sound like the countries are business friendly to me.

[1] http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1013882225402

This is a really annoying UX, I can't even tell who the top five countries are because the hover-overs overflow above the visible area of the map.

Yes, but it's zoomable.

Wow, Mexico sharing ranks along Nigeria, Kosovo and Ethiopia. Not surprised.

I am sure a lot of people will not agree with me here. But I feel Sweden is more corrupt than it appears. http://sloseriombudsmannen.se

I (never living in either) feel like US is way more corrupt than Germany, France, ...

I can not see how Saudi Arabia got that far,corruption is sucking billions there yet it ranks higher than many other countries.

That.

I don't get how Paraguay looks worse than us at Brazil, and Saudi Arabia looks better. I also don't get how Brazil and China can be at the same level, and how Russia can be so worse.

Interesting 3 way tie for last place between Somalia, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

The map of North America looks a little funny without the Great Lakes drawn in.

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