Uzbekistan, ranking 143 out of 180 countries, was named one of the best improvers in the fight against corruption over the past 5-10 years, Transparency International said in its Corruption Perception Index (CPI) report on Tuesday.
Among the countries of Central Asia, only Kazakhstan is higher in the ranking.
The CPI, which measures how corrupt a country's public sector is perceived to be by its experts and businesspeople, uses a scale of zero to 100 where zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.
The 2021 edition of the CPI ranked 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, drawing on 13 expert assessments and surveys of business executives.
In its report, Transparency International found countries that violate civil liberties consistently score lower on the CPI. Complacency in fighting corruption exacerbates human rights abuses and undermines democracy, setting off a vicious spiral. As these rights and freedoms erode and democracy declines, authoritarianism takes its place, contributing to even higher levels of corruption.
According to Transparency International, the top-performing countries were Denmark, Finland and New Zealand — all having a corruption perceptions score of 88 — followed by Norway, Singapore and Sweden, all of them scoring 85.
In contrast, the worst-performing countries were South Sudan with a corruption perceptions score of 11, followed by Syria (13), Somalia (13, Venezuela (14) and Afghanistan (16).
