Is it Right to Rank? Limitations, Implications and Potential Improvements of Corruption Indicies

This paper emphasizes the importance of collecting information on corruption, still stressing critical aspects of the cross-country composite corruption indices: Is this practice damaging and misleading or is it informative and useful? The title-question demands a broad discussion about the possibility of ranking countries on the basis of their extent of corruption. The paper points at the implication of the lack of a clear distinction between legal and illegal payments or ways of making influence. It summarizes the main limits of Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), underscores the problem of expecting perceptions to be reliable, and discusses the problem of incorrect understanding and usage of the index. Publicity does not necessarily mean progress, and the construction of the CPI should be influenced by the way this index is applied by the masses. A final question is whether it is possible to increase the CPI's value, for instance by creating incentives for states to improve their achievements on the OECD anti-bribery convention. This paper was presented at the IV Global Forum on Fighting Corruption, Brasilia 2005, June 7-10.