Tuesday, 18 December 2012

Malaysia does better in CPI

Malaysia has moved up six notches to 54th place in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2012 which is conducted by Trans­parency International (TI).

The announcement made by Transparency International-Malaysia (TI-M) ranked Malaysia third among Asean countries, behind Singapore (5th) and Brunei (46th).

“Malaysia’s position has improved slightly, staying in the mid-range average, indicating that many steps undertaken by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak through the Government Transformation Prog­ramme (GTP) to fight corruption have shown results,” said TI-M president Datuk Paul Low when announcing the CPI 2012.

This year, a total of 176 countries were assessed using an upgraded methodology.

Moving away from the old scoring system of one to 10, the new CPI scores range from zero to 100 with zero being most corrupt and 100 being corruption-free.

Malaysia scored 49 while Singa­pore scored 87 and Brunei, 55.

TI also stated that while none of the 176 countries in the list obtained a perfect score, two thirds of the countries scored below 50, indicating a serious corruption problem.

Low commended Malaysia for its commitment to fighting corruption as Malaysia was the only country assessed that included the CPI as part of its Key Performance Index (KPI) in fighting corruption.

He also warned that institutional corruption would harm and stunt the emerging Asean economy.

“The Asean economic community as a group must tackle corruption and if Malaysia aims to be a high income economy, we must resolve institutionalised corruption,” he said.

The CPI measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist in a country through 13 different surveys and country assessments by independent institutions.

These assessments are conducted among experienced observers such as businessmen and country analysts.

Fighting Corruption National Key Results Area (NKRA) director D. Ravindran, who is from the Per­formance Management and Delivery Unit (Pemandu), stated that the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Com­m­ission (MACC) and the Attorney-General’s Chambers would conduct anti-corruption training for lawmakers next year.

Asli Centre for Public Policy Studies chairman Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam wished for more government efforts to improve perception on corruption.

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