Philippines slips in 2017 world corruption rankings

 MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines has sunk lower in the global rankings of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and was even tagged as among Asia’s “worst offenders” of press freedom.

Based on the organization’s index report for 2017, the Philippines got a score of 34 points, a notch lower than its score of 35 in 2016 and 2015.

The Philippines slipped to 111th place among 180 countries included in the 2017 report, from 101st place in 2016.

The Philippines’ 2017 CPI score was the worst in five years or since 2012, following its slightly improved performance in 2013 (36 points) and in 2014 (38 points).

Furthermore, the report said that the Philippines, along with India and Maldives, is among the “worst regional offenders” of press freedom.

“These countries score high for corruption and have fewer press freedoms and higher numbers of journalist deaths,” the report read.

“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),” it added.

Transparency International said an analysis of its CPI results “indicates that countries with the least protection for press and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also tend to have the worst rates of corruption.”

The international group said at least one journalist is killed every week in a country that is highly corrupt.

“The analysis, which incorporates data from the Committee to Protect Journalists, shows that in the last six years, more than nine out of 10 journalists were killed in countries that score 45 or less on the index,” the group said.

The report used a scoring scale of 0 to 100, where 100 means “very clean” and 0 reflecting a “deep-rooted, systemic corruption problem.”

The index measures the experts’ and business people’s perceived level of corruption in the public sector.

Transparency International said the 2017 report shows “there is a high variance in public sector corruption across the Asia-Pacific region” with more than half of the countries scoring less than 50 points.

“In fact, on average, the region scores just 44... the Asia-Pacific countries, on average, are failing,” the report read.

The countries in Asia that got the worst scores are 161th placer Cambodia (21 points), 171th placer North Korea (17 points) and 177th placer Afghanistan (15 points).

New Zealand and Denmark rank highest with scores of 89 and 88, respectively.

Syria, South Sudan and Somalia rank lowest with scores of 14, 12 and nine, respectively.