The 2024 Transparency Corruption Index is out! With little surprise, the top five “cleanest” countries are Denmark, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, and Luxembourg. In 2023, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, and Singapore were also the top five cleanest countries with Norway dropping from 4th place in 2023 to 6th place this year. Similarly, at the bottom of the list this year are repeat offenders: South Sudan (in last place), Somalia, Venezuela, Syria, and Yemen. They were all also in the bottom five in 2023. It is hard to imagine the 2025 list will be any different.
I’ve written about this phenomenon before. Almost all global rankings are clones of each other: wealthy countries are almost always at the top of these lists and poor and warring countries at the bottom. The lists rarely, if ever, change.
With the exception of Singapore, each rich-country government spends more than $20,000 per capita annually. Governments in Norway and Luxembourg spend more than $40,000 per capita. By contrast, the government in Somalia spends less than $100 per person annually while that of South Sudan spends a few hundred dollars. In addition, the level of formality in the richest countries often surpasses 90% while that in poor countries hovers around 10-15%. Throwing money at this problem or simply formalizing an economy isn’t necessarily the answer. But governments do require money to run efficient bureaucracies, provide public services for their citizens, and reduce the temptation of overt corruption.
Why do we keep measuring progress in ways that don’t take into consideration the circumstances in which many countries find themselves? How might a better understanding of how progress happens help us measure corruption (and other global indicators) better?
Corruption and water
I teach a course titled Entrepreneurship and Market Creation in Emerging Markets at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In the course, students and I discuss corruption. After much debate about whether corruption is “good, bad, or not sure/it depends,” I explain how understanding a phenomenon is incredibly important if we are to make true progress.
I use an illustrative example to highlight the allure and pervasiveness of corruption in an environment of scarcity. I lift up a cup of water and explain to the students how any of them could walk less than 25 steps to the nearest water fountain to get water if they felt thirsty. And so, my cup of water, which helps quench my thirst during a three-hour class, is not at risk of being stolen or forcefully taken from me. But if that cup of water were the last remaining cup available, the situation would be very different. Students might plot to steal my cup or simply extort it from me.
Scarcity, as I described in this TED Talk, breeds corruption. A society does not develop because it has rooted out corruption. Instead, a society is able to reduce corruption because it has developed. And so, assessing a country’s progress on corruption without taking into consideration some important fundamentals such as, its access to resources necessary to fight corruption and its economic make-up, is not incredibly helpful.
A better way
Singapore currently spends roughly $13,000 per person annually and is consistently atop the list of many global rankings, including Transparency International’s Corruption Index. How does a country that spends barely half of what other countries spend on providing government services consistently rank at the top of these lists? How, for instance, does Rwanda, which spends less than $500 per person annually, rank higher than Spain which spends more than $14,000? What did corruption look like in today’s wealthy countries when they were poor? How did they root out corruption? Or at least mitigate overt corruption?
And perhaps most importantly, how might we measure corruption and progress against it differently? The scholar, Yuen Yuen Ang has some great suggestions in her book, China’s Gilded Age.
If we truly want to make progress however, these are the kinds of questions we need to wrestle with. These are some of the questions that the newly launched African School of Governance in Rwanda can tackle because to discuss corruption (and other government indicators) year in year out without a radical understanding of the circumstances in which people find themselves is not helpful.
