KATHMANDU – Nepal’s score in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) has dropped to 33 in 2020 from 34 in 2019.
The decline in the score has also sent Nepal’s global ranking down 4 positions to 117th out of 180 countries and jurisdictions included in the report, shows the CPI released by Transparency International today.
This decline in both score and ranking in the CPI shows that Nepal’s corruption level has increased in the last one year.
The index, which ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople, uses a scale of zero to 100, where zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.
Like previous years, more than two-thirds of countries score below 50 on this year’s CPI, with an average score of just 43. The data shows that despite some progress, most countries still fail to tackle corruption effectively, according to Transparency International.
The top countries on the CPI are Denmark and New Zealand, with scores of 88, followed by Finland, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland, with scores of 85 each.
The bottom countries are South Sudan and Somalia, with scores of 12 each, followed by Syria (14), Yemen (15) and Venezuela (15).
In Asia, key economies such as India (40), Indonesia (37) and Bangladesh (26) experienced slow progress in anti-corruption efforts, with several government commitments to reform not yet materialising effectively, according to the newly released report.
