How Corrupt is China?

Filed in archive Law on September 28, 2007

Is China corrupt? Sure. But, how corrupt? The China Law Blog published a post today that looked at where China stood compared to other nations...

Of the 180 countries surveyed by Transparency International, China ranked 72nd. They were tied with India, Mexico, Brazil, and a couple of other countries in that spot with a "cleanness" score of just 3.5 on a scale of 0 to 10. China was somewhat more corrupt than Turkey (64th with a score of 4.1) and almost as corrupt as Saudi Arabia (79th with a score of 3.4) and Thailand (in a 10-way tie for 84th with a score of 3.3).




I think it's pretty easy to say that corruption is bad. It reduces competition and adds to the cost of doing business. It's harder sometimes to convince people that corruption is relative - which is to say that all countries seem to have some degree of corruption, since no one scored a perfect ten on the scale.

You can think of countries in terms of their ranking. The USA ranked 20th, making it less corrupt that 160 other countries. Switzerland ranked 8th. So only 11 countries are more corrupt than Switzerland and less corrupt than America. That's not a very big difference, is it?

You can also think of countries in this report in terms of their scores. Switzerland scored a 9.0 on a scale of 0 to 10. The USA scored a 7.2 - which perhaps makes the difference between 8th place and 20th place look a bit bigger...

The China Law Blog interpreted the scores as being tied to the economic health of a country. The better a country's economy, the lower their score and their ranking. About 75% of the world's countries scored a 5.0 of lower on the scale.

The least corrupt country on earth? It was a three-way tie between New Zealand, Denmark, and Finland (all with a score of 9.4). The most corrupt country in the world? Somalia and myanmar tied for the lowest score: 1.4. They were just barely more corrupt than Iraq, whose score was 1.5 on the survey.