Guyana has registered its highest score on the Transparency International (TI) Corruption Index Report but even with a mark of 38 and ranking at 91 out of 180 countries it is still viewed as a very corrupt country.
New Zealand and Denmark received the highest scores of 89 and 88 and once again no country received a perfect score.
Guyana’s score this year is the best it has received as last year it was ranked at 34. For 2015, Guyana was ranked 119 with a score of 29 while in 2014, 2013 and 2012 it scored 30, 27 and 28 respectively.
Coming above Guyana in the Caribbean were Barbados; St. Vincent and the Grenadines; Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada; Jamaica, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago who were ranked at 25, 28, 40, 42, 48, 52, 68, and 77 respectively.
According to TI, this year’s report highlights that the majority of countries are making little or no progress in ending corruption. Further analysis, the report said, shows journalists and activists in corrupt countries risking their lives every day in an effort to speak out.
The index ranks countries according to their perceived levels of public sector corruption as viewed by experts and businesspeople and it uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.
“This year, the index found that more than two-thirds of countries score below 50, with an average score of 43. Unfortunately, compared to recent years, this poor performance is nothing new,” the report said.
While New Zealand and Denmark ranked the highest, Syria, South Sudan and Somalia ranked lowest with scores of 14, 12 and 9 respectively. The best performing region is Western Europe with an average score of 66 and the worst performing regions are Sub-Saharan Africa (average score 32) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (average score 34), according to the index.
