CORRUPTION
Thailand slips to 84th in worldwide graft index
- Published: 18/11/2009 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: News
Thailand ranks 10th in Asia, third in Southeast Asia and 84th in the world in this year's corruption index released by the global graft watchdog Transparency International.
The Kingdom scored 3.4 out of 10 in the rankings, which range from zero for highly corrupt to 10 for very clean.
Last year, Thailand was also ranked 10th in Asia, Transparency Thailand said yesterday. It ranked 80th in the world last year so Thailand's No.84 position this year means the country is being perceived as increasingly corrupt.
The scores are based on perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people and country analysts.
Singapore was the cleanest country in Asia and topped 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with its score of 9.2. Malaysia was second in the grouping with the score of 4.5.
Burma was last in Southeast Asia, scoring 1.4, followed by Cambodia and Laos, both scoring 2.0.
New Zealand was the least corrupt country in the world, ranking first at 9.4, followed by Denmark at 9.3 and then Singapore.
The most corrupt nation on Earth remained Somalia, the impoverished and war-torn Horn of Africa state that has been without a functioning government for two decades.
Overall, the 2009 corruption list is "of great concern," the organisation said, with the majority of countries scoring under five in the ranking.
The bottom five - Somalia, Afghanistan, Burma, Sudan and Iraq - show that "countries which are perceived as the most corrupt are also those plagued by long-standing conflicts, which have torn apart their governance infrastructure," TI said.
The graft watchdog hit out at rich countries over shady banking practices yesterday as it published its annual rankings naming and shaming the world's most corrupt countries.
"Corrupt money must not find a safe haven. It is time to put an end to excuses," said the Berlin-based group's head Huguette Labelle.
In the wake of the financial crisis, the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised countries turned up the heat on tax havens, targeting rich countries with long-held banking secrecy laws like Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
But Ms Labelle said extra efforts were imperative, calling for more bilateral treaties on information exchange in order to "fully end the secrecy regime."
Nevertheless, six years after the US-led invasion and the chaos that followed, Iraq was perceived to be slightly cleaner, with its score rising to 1.5 points from 1.3. It also climbed two places in the list.
But Afghanistan, where countries forming a 100,000-strong international force are pressing President Hamid Karzai to stamp out graft eight years after the ouster of the Taliban, slid from 1.5 points in 2008 to 1.3 in 2009.
The United States inched up from 7.3 points to 7.5 but dropped one place in the rankings to 19th.
China's rating was stable at 3.6 points but also fell seven places to 79th in the index.
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- Writer: Bangkok Post and AFP
