Group03 Report
Perceiving Evil: The Study of the Corruption Perception Index
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Issues and Problems
First launched in 1995, the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) has been widely credited with putting the issue of corruption on the forefront of the international policy agenda. Transparency International (TI), is an international non-governmental organization based in Berlin, Germany which acts to combat global corruption and prevent criminal activities arising from corruption.
TI publishes the CPI, annually ranking countries "by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys. The CPI generally defines corruption as "the misuse of public power for private benefit".
However, it has been a challenge to validate whether CPI is an accurate index to represent corruption. For instance, there is criticism in the usage of CPI’s methodology. Some flaws pointed out included: (1) it is too simplistic to capture CPI by a single score, (2) by measuring perceptions and not actual corruption itself, CPI will probably be reinforcing clichés and stereotypes and lastly (3) CPI measures the public and not private sectors.
Motivations and Objectives
The team’s motivation for this project is two-fold, firstly to understand if the CPI methodology is indeed too simplistic by looking at the underlying data that forms the final CPI for each country. Secondly, the team will like to observe if certain stereotypes that the public may have for different countries and / or regions are justified.
The CPI currently ranks 176 countries on a scale from 100 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). Denmark is the least corrupt country in the world, ranking consistently high among international financial transparency, while the most corrupt country in the world is North Korea, remaining on 8 out of 100 since 2012.
To verify the trends and patterns the CPI has with world statistics, the team referenced the World Bank Open Data website and married the World Development Indicators (WDI) with the CPI data set from Transparency International (from 2012 – 2016).
Our study aims to create an exploratory data visualization app that provides an overarching view of a country’s CPI with its underlying WDI, with emphasis on several aspects:
- Understanding the underlying survey results and metrics which form the final CPI numbers
- Find out if there are correlations between CPI and the 3 Es:
- Equality for Gender (e.g. labour participation rates)
- Economy (e.g. GDP, income gap)
- Education (education attainment, government expenditure on education), through looking at the relevant WDIs.
The reason these 3 topics were selected was that there were previous studies that touched on the relationships between CPI and education [ref 9], equality [ref 10] and economy [ref 11]. In this way, we hope to debunk any stereotypes and myths that the public has for each country.
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