Estonia ranks in 26th place in the world table of perceived corruption, according to figures released by Transparency International.
With a score of 6.5 (where 10 equals ‘highly clean’ and 0 ‘highly corrupt’) Estonia has moved up the table by one place compared with last year, says a report compiled by Baltic Business News.
The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) is based on public sector corruption, and the results have been drawn from some 13 assessments and surveys published between January 2009 and September 2010. The criterion for a change in rating consists of a movement of at least 0.3 points, and at least half of the available data for the country in question should point towards this change. On this basis, Estonia’s position remains unchanged on last year, although in practice it has moved up one place, simply due to one other country that was present in the list in 2009 having been excluded due to a failure to provide accurate data.
In fact only sixteen countries out of the total 178 saw either an improvement or a deterioration in their score over the last year.
Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore were in joint first place on the list with a score of 9.3, followed by Finland and Sweden jointly tied in second place with 9.2. The UK was in 20th place with a score of 7.5, the US was 22nd (7.1), Lithuania 46th (5.0) and Latvia 59th (4.3). The lowest placed country in 178th position was Somalia with a score of 1.1.
The full report can be downloaded at the Transparency International site.
