Slow, Imperfect Progress across Asia Pacific

Regional analysis by Alejandro Salas

This year’s results of the Corruption Perceptions Index continue to show a high variance in public sector corruption across the Asia Pacific region. From top scorers like New Zealand and Singapore, to some of the worst scorers like Cambodia, North Korea and Afghanistan, more than half of the countries in the Asia Pacific score less than 50 on the index. In fact, on average, the region scores just 44. With a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 means very clean and 0 reflects a deep-rooted, systemic corruption problem, the Asia Pacific countries, on average, are failing. See CPI regional results here.

Slight improvements

While no country in the Asia Pacific region scores a perfect 100, not even New Zealand or Singapore, which both experienced their share of scandals in the last year, our analysis reveals little progress across the region. In the last six years, only a few countries experienced small, incremental changes indicating signs of improvement.

For example, while Afghanistan rates very low on the index, its score increased by seven points in the last six years, moving from 8 in 2012 to 15 in 2016 and 2017. This may be attributed to some initial efforts nationwide to improve key policies, including better regulation of national procurement activities.

Similarly, Indonesia has a long way to go in the fight against corruption. However, it too climbed up the index, moving from 32 to 37 in the last five years, an overall increase of five points. This slight improvement could stem from the work of Indonesia’s leading anti-corruption agency in taking action against corrupt individuals, despite strong opposition from the government and parliament.

Stagnation in the region

Other countries, like South Korea, remain fairly stable in their scores over the last six years. South Korea experienced recent high-profile corruption scandals, which led to massive public protests and the swift impeachment and prosecution of the president.

Declining trends

Unfortunately, the results from the 2017 index also show that corruption in many countries is still strong. Often, when individuals dare to challenge the status quo, they suffer the consequences. In some countries across the region, journalists, activists, opposition leaders and even staff of law enforcement or watchdog agencies are threatened, and in the worst cases, even murdered.

Philippines, India and the Maldives are among the worst regional offenders in this respect. These countries score high for corruption and have fewer press freedoms and higher numbers of journalist deaths. In the last six years, 15 journalists working on corruption stories in these countries were murdered, as reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Just last year, Yameen Rasheed, an outspoken critic of the Maldives government was murdered for his efforts to uncover the truth about the disappearance of journalist Ahmed Rilwan.

While freedom of expression is under attack across much of the region, civic space is also shrinking severely. Civil society organisations in countries like Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and China are permanently under threat from authorities. In Cambodia, the government recently cracked down on civil society with the introduction of a restrictive law against NGOs. Cambodia is one of the worst-ranked countries in the region according to the CPI.