CPI 2023: Mutual Misunderstanding, Meaning, and Method
It suddenly occurred to our team last week that we were working on two different CPIs at the same time: The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
At one point, when a team member mentioned CPI, we were not sure what he or she was referring to.
Anyway, we successfully analysed both CPI reports in our Pocket Science and Marina and Maitama newsletters before the deadlines.
To forestall further mutual misunderstanding of the CPI, one must add that there’s yet another CPI, the California Personality Inventory (CPI).
“Specifically, predicting an individual’s reaction, what they will say or do, under conditions is part of the purpose of the CPI. Also, the CPI shows how others will view and assess this individual.”
Source: Fetzer Institute
“Rather than focusing on psychological disorders like many clinical personality tests, the CPI is designed to measure normal-range human behavior. Its purpose is to predict potential reactions and understand interpersonal behavior dynamics,” Joshua Napilay remarks.
Well, as corruption perception indicators intersect consumer price indices, one could use a California personality inventory to harness one’s stock of hope and tools to cope in the midst of Nigeria’s internal and external price instabilities.
Meaning for Nigeria
First, we think it’s Good News!
“The Nigerian is perceived to be less corrupt in 2023 than they were the year before. The country moved up one point from a CPI score of 24 in 2022 to 25 in 2023.
Source: Transparency International.
The CPI uses a scale from 0 to 100. 100 is very clean, and 0 is highly corrupt.
This improvement comes after 6 years of continuous decline into the abyss of corruption, data from Transparency International on the Global Corruption Perception Index (CPI) shows.
Nigeria’s improvement in its CPI 2023 score comes at a time when the Americas and Western European/European Union countries are sliding down gradually in their corruption perception scores.
Yet, many times, behind every good news is a bitter truth.
For the CPI, Transparency International relies on between 3 and 13 sources that measure corruption across countries to determine its own corruption score for each country.
In the case of Nigeria, 8 such sources were consulted in computing the latest CPI score of 25/100. All these sources had their own independent assessment of corruption across countries:
World Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) 2022
Bertelsmann Stiftung (BS) Transformation Index 2024
The PRS Group International (PRSI) Country Risk Guide 2023
World Economic Forum Executive Opinion Survey (WEF EOS) 2023
World Justice Project (WJP) Rule of Law Index Expert Survey 2023
Global Insight (GI) Country Risk Ratings 2022
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Country Risk Service 2023
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem v. 13) 2023
Only 3 of these 8 sources scored Nigeria above the Sub-Saharan averages: World Bank CPIA 2022 scored Nigeria highest with a corruption-clean score of 35/100. Bertelsmann Stiftung (BS) Transformation Index 2024 scored it 33/100, while the PRS Group International (PRSI) Country Risk Guide 2023 scored it 26/100.
The rest, beginning with Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index 2023, scored Nigeria below the Sub-Saharan average scores.
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem v. 13) 2023 even scored Nigeria lower than they scored the 3 countries Transparency International scored lowest in its CPI.
The other 5 sources of corruption measurements (not used in calculating Nigeria’s CPI 2023) are:
The African Development Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment 2021
Bertelsmann Stiftung Sustainable Governance Indicators 2022 3. Bertelsmann Stiftung Transformation Index 2024
Freedom House Nations in Transit 2023
IMD World Competitiveness Center World Competitiveness Yearbook Executive Opinion Survey 2023
Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Asian Intelligence 2023
Anyway, if the CPI reflects the view of Transparency International and 8 other research and policy organisations, we can say Nigeria is making progress in its struggle against corruption in the public sector.
Meaning for the World
A sneak peek into the newly-released CPI 2023 figures shows an unimpressive global performance.
“Over two-thirds of countries score below 50 out of 100, which strongly indicates that they have serious corruption problems. The global average is stuck at only 43, while the vast majority of countries have made no progress or declined in the last decade. What is more, 23 countries fell to their lowest scores to date this year,” the Chair of Transparency International, François Valérian, regretted.
Mr Valérian was transparent about the fact that all is not well even with the countries that appeared to score high corruption-clean scores.
“Countries ranking high on the CPI have an impunity problem of their own, even if this isn’t reflected in their scores. Many cross-border corruption cases have involved companies from top-scoring countries that resort to bribery when doing business abroad. Others have implicated professionals who sell secrecy or otherwise enable foreign corrupt officials. And yet, top-scoring countries often fail to go after perpetrators of transnational corruption and their enablers,” he noted.
He identifies weakened checks and balances, erosion of political integrity, authoritarianism, lack of judicial independence, weak rule of law, conflict and struggles with political corruption as the causes of unrelenting global corruption.
Mutual Understanding
Transparency International’s CPI is unique for its specificity on corruption. While other institutions measure corruption as a part of some broader socioeconomic problem, CPI aggregates their many outlooks and outcomes of corruption to construct a robust corruption-specific metric.
This excerpt from TI’s CPI 2023 report explains the often misunderstood notions about the Corruption Perception Index:
What is the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)?
The CPI scores and ranks countries/territories based on how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be by experts and business executives. It is a composite index, a combination of 13 surveys and assessments of corruption collected by a variety of reputable institutions. The CPI is the most widely used indicator of corruption worldwide.
Why do we need the CPI if there are 13 other sources that measure manifestations of corruption in the public sector?
There are four properties which make the CPI a valuable governance indicator:
1. The CPI has a global geographical coverage.
2. The CPI is more reliable than each source taken separately because it compensates for eventual errors among sources by taking the average of at least three different sources and potentially as many as 13.
3. The CPI, with its 0-100 scale, can differentiate between perceived levels of corruption with more granularity than sources which, for example, have scales of 1-7 or 1-10 where each country is assigned a full number.
4. Since the underlying CPI sources assess different dimensions and manifestations of public sector corruption, the CPI manages to reconcile different aspects of corruption into one indicator.
Why is the CPI based on perceptions?
Corruption generally comprises illegal activities, which are deliberately hidden and only come to light through scandals, investigations or prosecutions.
Whilst researchers from academia, civil society and governments have made advances in terms of objectively measuring corruption in specific sectors, to date there is no indicator which measures objective national levels of corruption directly and exhaustively.
The sources and surveys which make up the CPI, ask their respondents questions which are based on carefully designed and calibrated questionnaires.
The CPI contains informed views of relevant stakeholders, which generally correlate highly with objective indicators, such as citizen experiences with bribery as captured by the Global Corruption Barometer.
Minuses
The CPI utilises 13 sources that measure only expert opinions on the level of corruption in the public sector. With this, it differs from the usual sampling that involves a fair spread of the population.
Also, it only includes sources that provide a score for a specific set of countries or territories and is based on information published within the last two years. Thus
Furthermore, the CPI measures some aspects of corruption and leaves out others. This excerpt from the CPI 2023 Report contains its limitations:
Which manifestations of corruption does the CPI capture?
CPI source data captures the following aspects of corruption, based on the specific question wording used to collect the data:
Bribery
Diversion of public funds
Prevalence of officials using public office for private gain without facing consequences
Ability of governments to contain corruption and enforce effective integrity mechanisms in the public sector
Red tape and excessive bureaucratic burden which may increase opportunities for corruption
Meritocratic versus nepotistic appointments in the civil service
Effective criminal prosecution for corrupt officials
Adequate laws on financial disclosure and conflict of interest prevention for public officials
Legal protection for whistleblowers, journalists, investigators when they are reporting cases of bribery and corruption
State capture by narrow vested interests
Access of civil society to information on public affairs
Which manifestations of corruption does the CPI not capture?
CPI source data does not capture the following aspects of corruption:
Citizens’ perceptions or experience of corruption
Tax fraud
Illicit financial flows
Enablers of corruption (lawyers, accountants, financial advisors etc)
Money-laundering
Private sector corruption
Informal economies and markets
Despite its limitations and delimitations, CPI remains a transparent tool to gauge the extent of corruption entrenched within governments.
François Valérian believes “Corruption will continue to thrive until justice systems can punish wrongdoing and keep governments in check. When justice is bought or politically interfered with, it is the people that suffer.”
And in Nigeria, the people suffer and smile.
Thanks for reading this edition of Data Dive. Wish you finer reasons to smile!