cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47165348
I noticed many people believe, that Western countries ranking low on corruption indexes, shows they aren’t corrupt as hell.
To me this just means it’s at a higher, much harder to prove level.
Instead of starting at the cop level (which is still possible with connections), it starts at the points where multi-millions can be made without anyone really noticing.
E.g. farm land > residential use, construction projects, sale of government properties, favors for corps etc.
On Wikipedia, the CPI has a criticisms section highlight many of its flaws. You could read up on that if you want. There are plenty of articles on this too.
The TLDR seems to be: not politically motivated, the CPI isn’t blatant propaganda. However, it does not cover all forms of corruption, it has a bias towards “perceived” corruption, and it is strongly biased against lower income nations.
As with many of these kinds of indexes, they are a decent-ish generalisation of the issue but are not enough to accurately depect such a complex topic.