ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the indices that have been designed to assess corruption at the level of the nation state; namely the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The CPI was created by a non-governmental organisation called Transparency International based in Berlin, Germany, but with many offices throughout the world. One way of measuring the extent of corruption is to ask those who have been negatively impacted by it or, in other words, those that pay the cost. The key point is that the CPI is an amalgamation of many individual surveys, all of which have one thing in common – they attempt to assess perception of corruption. The CPI is based upon the experience of those visiting or residing within a country, and it is quite possible that this experience is centred round commercial and urban centres rather than the country as a whole.
