Increasing levels of public sector corruption worldwide are providing fertile ground to rising populist politicians, according to the annual index of perceived corruption.

Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index 2016 – which ranks 176 countries on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean) – shows that more countries have declined than improved compared with figures for last year.

More than two-thirds (69%) of the states included in the index scored less than 50 out of 100, and were therefore judged to have a serious corruption problem. Last year’s index struck a more optimistic note, with more countries improving than doing worse.

According to Transparency International, the increasing perception of corruption in public services – and the impunity enjoyed by those who profit from it – is increasingly pushing countries towards populist politicians who promise to change the system and break the cycle of corruption and privilege.

“However this is likely to only exacerbate the issue,” says José Ugaz, chair of Transparency International. “In countries with populist or autocratic leaders, we often see democracies in decline and a disturbing pattern of attempts to crack down on civil society, limit press freedom and weaken the independence of the judiciary. Instead of tackling crony capitalism, those leaders usually install even worse forms of corrupt systems.”

Ugaz points to the scores of Hungary and Turkey, which have fallen with the rise of autocratic leaders. By way of contrast, he highlights the improvement in Argentina’s ranking since it replaced the populist government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2015.

Denmark again tops the index’s rankings, with a score of 90, tying with New Zealand as least corrupt, closely followed by Finland (89) and Sweden (88). The UK holds the same position as last year, ranked 10th (81) with Luxembourg.



For the 10th year running, Somalia is the worst performer, scoring only 10 points, followed by South Sudan (11) and North Korea (12). Countries in the Middle East experiencing war and political turmoil are among those that registered the most substantial drops this year, with Syria (13) and Yemen (14) falling to the very bottom of the index.

Qatar has suffered the biggest fall in the rankings, dropping 10 points below its score of 2015. Transparency International has attributed this partly to the exposé of human rights abuses suffered by migrant workers on World Cup 2022 construction sites, first revealed by the Guardian in 2013.

“The Fifa scandals, the investigations into the decision to host the World Cup in 2022 in Qatar, and reports of human rights abuses for migrant workers have clearly affected the perception of the country,” says Ugaz.

Explaining this year’s trend of declining country scores, Transparency International points to major cases of global corruption in 2016 such as the Panama Papers leak, the continuing political fallout from the Petrobras and Odebrecht bribery cases in Brazil and the scandals engulfing former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych as further undermining faith in the integrity of global political and financial institutions.

“Collusion between businesses and politicians denies national economies of billions of dollars of revenues that were siphoned off to benefit the few at the expense of the many,” says Ugaz. “As the Panama Papers showed, it is still far too easy for the rich and powerful to exploit the opaqueness of the global financial system to enrich themselves at the expense of the public good.”

Transparency International says the only way to tackle endemic political and corporate corruption and impunity is through deep-rooted system reforms to address the growing imbalance of power and wealth, and by empowering citizens to hold the powerful to account. Reforms should include disclosure through public registries, revealing ownership of companies, and sanctions to those who are complicit in moving money illegally across borders.

“Corruption and inequality feed off each other, creating a vicious circle between corruption, unequal distribution of power in society, and unequal distribution of wealth,” says Ugaz. “In too many countries, people are deprived of their most basic needs and go to bed hungry every night because of corruption, while the powerful and corrupt enjoy lavish lifestyles with impunity.”

However, Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, criticised the index for distorting and misrepresenting the landscape of global corruption. “One of the main drivers of global corruption is now cross-border corruption predicated on the basis of financial secrecy, and what you now see is that – whether it be the stripping of assets or shifting of profits across borders – the countries that are largely responsible or driving this, such as Singapore or Switzerland, are the ones always ranked very highly [as least corrupt] in the index.

“The index is largely based on the assessments of a small group of international elites who still tend to link corruption to poverty, but I think this gives the perception of corruption from the wrong end of the telescope.”

The corruption perceptions index is compiled by Transparency International by aggregating data from a number of different sources that provide perceptions of businesspeople and country experts of the level of corruption in the public sector.