The writer is a researcher at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.
CONSIDER a hypothetical case: there are no systems in a country to check corruption but there is still zero corruption in the country because all its citizens are honest for ethical or religious reasons. But this corruption-free country may well be ranked as ‘significantly corrupt’ on Transparency International’s (TI) Corruption Perception Index (CPI).
TI’s CPI poses questions that assess actual corruption and the potential of corruption in a country. The latter is inferred from the prevalence of systems to check corruption eg ‘access of civil society to information on public affairs’. The lack of such systems means a poor rank on the CPI. In practice, all of us know many people who do not indulge in corruption, not because there are systems in place to check it but because they are honest. The CPI hardly accounts for honesty.