Transparency International

Transparency International (TI) is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in Berlin that cooperates with business, government, and civil society to combat corruption around the world. TI works at the national and international levels to lessen both the supply and demand of corruption, which it defines as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. Launched in 1993, TI began because most world business and government officials were ignoring corruption. Yet some people in both developed and developing nations were concerned about the large-scale bribery by businesses as they “bought” officials and politicians in the developing world; such corruption hurt economic development and undermined human rights.

TI raises awareness about the damaging effects of corruption, advocates policy reform, works toward the implementation of multilateral conventions, and subsequently monitors compliance by governments, corporations, and banks. TI estimates that the amount lost to bribery in government procurement worldwide is more than $400 billion each year. TI has chapters in 95 countries, which work to increase accountability and transparency in their own nations. In addition, there are regional networks of TI chapters that cooperate on regional issues in Latin America, South Asia, Southern Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe. China and Saudi Arabia do not have chapters because independent chapters there are not possible, and TI will not accept a mere government-sponsored chapter. TI does not expose individual cases of corruption; however, it does train journalists to investigate and expose cases of corruption in their countries. Thus TI works to make long-term gains against corruption by focusing on prevention and reforming systems.

TI has worked with the leading industrialized nations of the world, through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in establishing an antibribery convention for its member states. Chapter members in European nations, especially in Germany and France, pressured their own governments to support the pact. Moreover, TI insisted that there be effective monitoring systems. Earlier, Latin American TI chapters cooperated to enact an antibribery convention in that region.

A principal vehicle for combating corruption is providing information or transparency, hence the name. TI has received much media attention and therefore has been effective with its annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The CPI is a list of countries (146 in 2005) in rank order from least corrupt to most corrupt. To compile this index, TI uses 18 surveys of businesspeople and country analysts that inquire about a country's corruption; they will not list a country unless they have at least three polls. Statisticians at TI then average these polls to arrive at their annual list. TI held its first annual meeting in 1994 and began publishing the CPI in 1995. In the current CPI ranking, the least corrupt are Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Iceland, and Singapore; the United States is number 18 out of 146 countries. The most corrupt are Chad, Myanmar, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Haiti. For the current CPI, the annual ranking of countries, and much other valuable information on TI, see TI's Web site (http://www.transparency.org). TI found that corruption is rampant in 60 of the 146 countries that it ranked and that the public sectors of those countries are plagued by bribery. These 60 countries scored less than 3, compared with a clean score of 10 on the TI list; a total of 105 countries scored less than 5 on that list. TI also measures the countries in which corruption seems to be decreasing, and those countries in which it is increasing. TI challenged the myth of the northern moral superiority of the industrialized nations when it developed data showing that private firms from wealthy northern [Page 2107]nations were principal agents undermining governments in developing nations because of their bribes.

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