The Czechia won in the new Corruption Index Transparency International (TI) 56 points out of a hundred, and thus jumped eight places to 41st place out of 180 evaluated countries. Nevertheless, according to TI, the government, which has been leading the country for over a year, is not doing enough.
“The government of Petr Fiala (ODS) does not represent any significant change in this respect. It seems that she was satisfied with the fact that Andrej Babiš (ANO) is no longer the prime minister and forgot that he can be one again. The government coalition has not yet found the courage to amend the completely toothless conflict of interest law, its proposal to protect whistleblowers is only a shadow of a truly effective solution, and even the weak plans to regulate lobbying do not raise great hopes,” explained Ondřej Kopečný, director of Transparency International CR.
According to Kopečný, the governing parties did not behave in an exemplary manner in their own corruption cases. “The approach of government parties to corruption affairs is also disappointing. As far as their members are concerned, as in the past, we are witnessing a number of excuses, downplaying of information or the appointment of involved politicians in advisory positions,” says the director of TI.
This year, the Czechia overtook Poland in the corruption index and received the most points from the V4 countries. However, Poland has been declining in recent years. The situation is even worse for Hungary, which has lost 13 points in the last 10 years.
„CPI (corruption perception index, note ed.) must be perceived in the long term. It captures developments and trends in the given company. It is obvious that the Czechia has been treading on the spot for fifteen years. Although it is not falling significantly like, for example, Hungary, at the same time it is not improving at all,” explains Petr Leyer, a lawyer and member of the board of TI CR, why the Czech Republic cannot celebrate a slight improvement.
Despite a two-point year-on-year improvement and a shift within the V4 countries, the Czechia remains eight points behind the European Union average. Within the member states, the Czech Republic jumped from 19th place to 16th place, which it shares with Italy and Slovenia. The worst situation in the EU is Hungary (42 points), which lost a point compared to last year, Bulgaria (43 points) and Romania (46 points).
Transparency International considers the influence of the European Union in the fight against corruption to be very significant. According to the non-profit organization, over the past ten years, Czech legislators have approved most of the anti-corruption laws thanks to European legislation. Pressure from international organizations, such as the Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) and Moneyval, a commission at the Council of Europe that monitors compliance with standards in the field of terrorist financing and money laundering, also had a positive effect.
Czechia without a strategy
However, according to Transparency International, in addition to legislation from the EU, the Czech Republic lacks an anti-corruption strategy for a long time. In recent years, the improvement alternates with decline and vice versa.
“Although politicians like to talk about corruption and include the fight against it in their political marketing, the fulfillment of pre-election promises lags considerably. At Transparency, we have to actively lobby again and again and again for the adoption of functional and high-quality anti-corruption legislation, which after the elections again fell somewhere between the parliamentary benches,” says David Kotora, TI CR’s head of communications.
The non-profit organization dealing with corruption therefore believes that there is a lack of systemic change in the Czech Republic and that there is insufficient emphasis on the fight against corruption even in strategic materials. In the Czech Republic, there is a lack of properly set regulations on lobbying or transparent data on subsidies and the work of authorities.
“We should realize that inaction in the fight against corruption can have an impact on the country’s economy in the long run, because a corrupt environment negatively disrupts, among other things, a competitive environment. Either a conflict of interests, an unregulated lobbying environment or non-transparent public contracts can lead to patronage of some companies and an increase in their market share, which significantly impairs competitiveness in the given sector,” said Eva Kotlánová, a member of the Supervisory Board of TI CR and an economist working at the Department of Economics and public administration of the Business and Entrepreneurship Faculty in Karviná.
An alternative measure of corruption
Measuring corruption is inherently difficult. It is supposed to capture something that takes place in secret and, if possible, without traces. It is even more difficult to compare corruption between countries. Therefore, the organization Transparency International in its ranking Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI, published since 1995) uses data from anonymous questionnaires as well as data collected by 13 different institutions from around the world, such as the World Bank. Then the researchers “standardize” the results on a scale from 0 to 100 so that the different values are comparable in one table.
The advantage is the global reach of such a metric and its long-term nature, so it is possible to monitor changes in the ranking of countries over time. However, this method also has its critics. It measures the “perception of corruption”, not actual corruption. For example, if there is a suspicion of a significant corruption event in country X, journalists will look at how country X ranks in the corruption rankings. These reports will continue to deepen Country X’s reputation as corrupt.
“Thus, the impression of ‘corruption-plagued country X’ can be cemented, regardless of whether any corruption has occurred,” pointed out in 2013 researcher Alex Cobham of the Center for Global Development. “This vicious circle lacks not only evidence of actual corruption in country X, but also any information about how corruption does or does not affect the citizens of that country.” Cobham recalls that the founder of the CPI in 2009 from the project resigned and no longer wants to be associated with him.
Corruption rankings are useful, they raise awareness of the problem of corruption. But they are misleading. They underestimate the level of corruption in rich and developed countries.
For another reason criticizes the CPI corruption ranking of researcher Yuen Yuen Angová, who works at the University of Michigan. According to her, instead of asking “Which country is the most (or least) corrupt?”, analysts should consider a different set of questions: “In which country is prevalent what type of corruption?” Why? With what consequences? How can we fight against different types of corruption?’
“Measuring corruption worldwide annually is expensive and difficult. Existing rankings provide a huge public service. They help raise awareness of corruption and mobilize the public to fight against it,” admits Angová.
“However, the existing rankings are also misleading, in two key ways. First, they do not distinguish between different types of corruption, they combine everything into one assessment. Second, it under-measures the type of corruption that occurs in rich capitalist economies. I call it access money. Elites use their power and wealth for various behind-the-scenes exchanges that may be legally legal. As a result, rich countries always appear blameless in these rankings. This reinforces the impression that corruption is something that only happens to people in poor countries.”
According to Angová, it is useful to divide corruption into several categories, depending on whether it concerns money and whether it involves high-ranking elites:
| ordinary people | the elite | |
| enrichment | petty theft | grand theft |
| (the petty official will talk about the fees, which will then end up in his pocket) | (a politician or high-ranking official tunnels public finances) | |
| something for something | acceleration for money | access for money |
| (officer accepts bribe to speed application through approval process, patient unofficially pays extra for better care) | (companies finance actions of high-ranking politicians, the politician reciprocates with milder supervision or enforcement of a favorable law) |
“When someone bribes a local official to avoid bureaucratic delays, I call it speeding for money. On the other hand, when a high-ranking politician uses his influence and receives some benefits from rich businessmen as a reward, I call it the approach for money,” describes Angová. “When people talk about bribes, they usually mean acceleration for money, and access for money is forgotten.”
In such a segmented view of corruption, one can point out not only differences between the level of corruption, but also differences between different types of corruption in different countries. For example, China and India are close to each other in Transparency International’s ranking, around the middle of the list. But every country faces a different type of corruption.
“Although both countries have a similar level of corruption in the overall view, the specific form of corruption is different. In China, the most common approach is money-for-money, where high-ranking people exchange influence for wealth, while in India, cases of acceleration for money predominate,“ shows Anga. According to her, another typical example is the United States, where the level of other types of corruption is low, but access for money is relatively widespread here, although not as much as in India or China.
Corruption cases in recent years in the Czech Republic have shown that the country has still not adopted the practice of the West. “Approaching the political culture usual in Western countries, i.e. that a politician who is suspected of illegal conduct interrupts his political career until he clears his name, has still not occurred in the Czech Republic,” said Marek Chromý, TI CR’s leading analyst.
Somalia vs. Denmark
The best performer in the Index was Denmark, which received 90 points last year and continues to grow from previous years. About the second, respectively Finland shares third place with New Zealand with 87 points, followed by Norway with 84 points. On the other hand, Somalia closes the index with 12 points, Syria and South Sudan are one point better, and Venezuela is two points better.
Afghanistan improved the most compared to last year (eight points), which has also been on the upward curve for a long time. Botswana had five more points this year, while Israel and Angola scored four more points than last year. On the contrary, Oman (-8 points), Azerbaijan (-7 points) and Burma (-5 points) worsened the most year-on-year.
In the table, it is possible to search by country name or sort by values in individual columns.
