Making things worse

Corruption has exacerbated the eurozone debt crisis and continues to hamper efforts to control it, anti-graft organization Transparency International said in its annual report on global corruption released Thursday.

Debt-ridden countries Greece and Italy scored particularly poorly among the 183 countries ranked in the report. On a scale of zero to 10, zero signifying the highest perceived corruption, Italy and Greece scored 3.9 and 3.4, respectively. That placed Italy in 69th place (first being the least corrupt) and Greece in 80th place.

The report said the financial woes experienced across the 17-nation eurozone have happened "partly because of public authorities' failure to tackle the bribery and tax evasion that are key drivers of the debt crisis."

Robin Hodess, director of research for the Berlin-based group, added that the eurozone crisis "reflects poor financial management, lack of transparency and mismanagement of public funds."

At the bottom of the list were Somalia and North Korea, both scoring 1.0. At the more positive end of the scale, New Zealand topped the survey with a score of 9.5, followed by Denmark and eurozone country Finland. France and Germany, the eurozone's two biggest economies, ranked 25th and 14th, respectively.

The report also cited the Arab Spring revolutions as evidence that "nepotism, bribery and patronage were so deeply ingrained in daily life that even existing anti-corruption laws had little effect" in the region.

Transparency International's annual corruption report analyzes data from 17 surveys, looking at factors like enforcement of anti-corruption laws, access to information and conflicts of interest.

Author: Andrew Bowen (AFP, dpa)
Editor: Martin Kuebler