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Fighting corruption head-on in South-East Asia

When the leaders of the 10 nations that make up the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) meet in Malaysia in April for the 26th ASEAN Summit, they need to be bolder in their approach to combatting corruption. Corruption will hold back investment in the region and stifle growth in both the public and private […]

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Redefining success: incentives for cultural change in banks

Despite the bailouts and regulation after the 2008 financial crisis, unethical behaviour at banks has cost shareholders close to US$10 billion over the past two years in the form of fines. No wonder there is fierce competition on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly now as banks are beginning to report their results, over diminishing […]

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Lives on the line as Serbia battles healthcare corruption

A number of doctors and a head nurse at a hospital in Nis, Serbia’s third largest city, were arrested last month for allegedly accepting bribes of up to €13,000 and using their networks to secure healthcare jobs for relatives. Such news echoes results from Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, which revealed that 81 per […]

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OECD sheds light on transnational corruption

This week, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a ground-breaking report that dissects the massive and mostly hidden phenomenon of transnational corruption. Looking at more than 400 bribery cases across 41 countries that amounted to US$13.8 million per bribe, the report gives a glimpse inside the shadowy world of corrupt practices by […]

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Sub-Saharan Africa: corruption still hurts daily lives

Once again, the Corruption Perceptions Index results are not fundamentally different from previous years: the majority of African countries still have a score of less than 50 per cent, which in our view depicts a situation of endemic corruption. In a continent with high level of economic growth rates (compared to many parts of the […]

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Middle East and North Africa: a region in turmoil

Three out of the bottom 10 countries on Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index are from the Middle East and North Africa. Two of these three are in the midst of gruesome civil wars where lives are being lost daily. Iraq and Libya tell a story of a region in turmoil plagued with geopolitical insecurity, […]

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Corruption in the Americas: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

The 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index does not show significant movement in the scores of the countries in the Americas. For the more cynical among us, this is a good sign as there is always the possibility of worsening. But the reality is that stagnation is not good news. Each year that passes without things improving, […]

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Putting public sector corruption on the map

The Corruption Perceptions Index, the annual index of perceived levels of public sector corruption around the globe, enters its 20th year of publication this year. Over the past two decades, the index has become one of the key corruption indices worldwide. There is a Harvard case on it and it has even been used as a […]

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Challenging corruption in Afghanistan

Two years ago all the major donors to Afghanistan met in Tokyo to map a way forward for the war-torn country. Then president Hamid Karzai promised if the money kept coming in he would ensure it would not be lost to corruption. At the time Transparency International recommended a raft of measures aimed at curbing […]

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Corruption and banking: forex heralds an important change in rhetoric

This week’s announcement about the rigging of the foreign exchange markets marks one significant change: at last, the media and the Chancellor are using the word corruption to describe this behaviour. Today we take tough action to clean up corruption.” – UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne Since the financial crisis started in 2008, banks have been fined […]

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