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PH drops 10 notches in global corruption index

The global corruption index ranked the Philippines 95th out of 168 countries in the list with a score of 35 out of 100.

The country was ranked 95th among 168 countries in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index for 2015, 10 ranks below the 85th position the country was at in 2014.

Issues concerning the Department of Transportation and Communication (DOTC) and the delay in the filing of charges against politicians involved in the pork barrel scam were some of the reasons anti-corruption and good governance groups cited as reasons for the drop in the country’s corruption index raking.

Denmark and New Zealand were considered the least corrupt of all the countries, as both scored 90; while Somalia landed at the bottom.

The watchdog uses data from institutions including the World Bank, the African Development Bank and business school IMD to compile the perceptions of the scale of public sector corruption.

The score runs from zero for highly corrupt, to 100 for ‘clean governments’.

“The lower-ranked countries in our index are plagued by untrustworthy and badly functioning public institutions like the police and judiciary. Even where anti-corruption laws are on the books, in practice they’re often skirted or ignored,” Transparency International (TI) explained.

For the Philippines, TI said that while President Rodrigo Duterte rose to power with a promise to stop corruption, “the impact of death squads, attacks on media, and violent intimidation to the detriment of democracy and democratic institutions is yet to be seen in 2017.”

In Asia Pacific as a whole, TI said a majority of countries in the region “sit in the bottom half” of the CPI 2016, with 19 out of 30 countries in the region getting a score of 40 or less, out of 100.

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