Most Trusted Countries
Transparency International researches and publishes an annual corruption perceptions index. The 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index shows that nearly three quarters of the 178 countries in the index score below five, on a scale from 10 (highly clean) to 0 (highly corrupt).
Below are the top 30 most trusted or said another way least corrupt countries for 2010. See the rest of the 178 countries including Russia at 154 and The Philippines at 134.
Transparency International advocates enforcing The United Nations Convention against Corruption to restore trust and responsibility in the global economy.
Charles M.C. Lee, an expert on markets and accounting at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and his researchers ranked 44 countries based on the “Corruption Perception Index” (CPI) compiled yearly by Transparency International, a non-profit organization battling global corruption. The group’s “poll of polls” incorporates results of up to a dozen surveys on perceptions of public sector corruption as held by analysts, businesspeople and local residents.
He then correlated the corruption rankings with publicly available financial data on companies for 1994 to 2003. For each country, they calculated two measures of how stock markets value enterprises – the market price-to-book ratio of equity for the average firm, and the ratio of market value to book value for debt plus equity for the average firm.
The 44 countries studied were divided into three groups—”low corrupt”, “mid corrupt”, and “high corrupt.” The results: the higher the corruption, the lower the market valuations. The average price-to-book ratio for equity was only 1.88 in high-corrupt countries, compared with 2.19 in mid-corrupt places, and 2.36 in low-corrupt ones. The study found that corruption was still significant even after controlling for other variables such as companies’ inherent profit margins and countries’ inherent growth rates or currency risks.
RANK COUNTRY/TERRITORY SCORE
1 Denmark 9.3
1 New Zealand 9.3
1 Singapore 9.3
4 Finland 9.2
4 Sweden 9.2
6 Canada 8.9
7 Netherlands 8.8
8 Australia 8.7
8 Switzerland 8.7
10 Norway 8.6
11 Iceland 8.5
11 Luxembourg 8.5
13 Hong Kong 8.4
14 Ireland 8.0
15 Austria 7.9
15 Germany 7.9
17 Barbados 7.8
17 Japan 7.8
19 Qatar 7.7
20 United Kingdom 7.6
21 Chile 7.2
22 Belgium 7.1
22 United States 7.1
24 Uruguay 6.9
25 France 6.8
26 Estonia 6.5
27 Slovenia 6.4
28 Cyprus 6.3
28 United Arab Emirates 6.3
30 Israel 6.1
