Corruption is hardly a victimless crime. A major contributor to the massive death toll from the Haiti earthquake was shoddily constructed buildings that couldn’t have been erected under the oversight of professional and honest inspectors.

Haiti ranked as the 10th most corrupt country in Transparency International’s most recent corruption perception index. Globally, amid economic troubles, corruption seems to be one of the few things that has grown. Transparency International’s latest corruption index shows that 75 of 180 countries surveyed scored below 3 on a 10-point scale of governmental honesty, an increase from 72 countries in 2008.

There were a lot of repeat offenders, including perennially corrupt nations like Somalia, Iran and Venezuela. Russia slipped a notch to rank 147th with a corruption index score of 2.2. The U.S. can’t afford to be smug, as it also fell one place to 19th with a score of 7.3. (Blame Congress: Surveys show “the legislature is perceived as the institution most affected by corruption” in the U.S., Transparency International said.)

Chronic goodie-two-shoes New Zealand came in first with a score of 9.4, with Denmark in second with a score of 9.3, unchanged from 2008.

At the other end of the scale was Somalia, which barely qualifies as a nation given its nonstop civil wars and economy based mostly on spectacular acts of piracy.

Corruption is a fixture in countries like Egypt, India, Indonesia, Morocco and Pakistan, where 60% of executives surveyed reported having been solicited for a bribe. Transparency International figures bribes consume an estimated US$20-billion to US$40-billion a year worldwide, money that could be used for productive investment and jobs.

And broadening the definition just a bit, Transparency International warns that excessive pay, opaque financial structures and offshore havens from financial regulation all work to undermine honesty throughout the system.

“When high-level executives award themselves extraordinary pay packages, lower-level managers may be tempted to sweeten their own pay package by soliciting bribes from suppliers,” the organization notes.

Source: Vancouver Scan.

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