How trustworthy is your country?
Trust is a funny thing. It is emotional, ergo subjective. A number of factors can influence trust, such as past experiences, physical attributes and gut feelings. The idea of a trustworthy country is difficult to define because what makes a country trustworthy is not only its laws, but also the people who create and abide by them (or not). Therefore, the image of a country can affect the image of its people, both positively and negatively. A CNBC Business article by Jo Bowman mentions an interested finding from the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Branding Index:
Just as companies are branded by the country they’re from, so too are people. Anholt’s worldwide survey of people’s attitudes to other countries’ nationals found that, on average, if presented with two candidates for a job that were equal apart from one being Turkish and the other Swedish, 80% of people would hire the Swede. Staggeringly, more than 70% of Turkish respondents also said they’d hire the Swede.
Transparency International (TI) produces the annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI), which ranks countries according to the perception of corruption in the public sector. The 2010 CPI measures the perceived level of public sector corruption in 178 countries around the world. The map below shows the results of the 2010 CPI. View the map on the interactive website.
(Source: www.transparency.org)
Surprisingly, three quarters of the countries shown above have a score below five, indicating that there is a serious global corruption problem. So what can countries do to improve their trustworthiness as well as that of their people? TI suggests the following:
To address these challenges, governments need to integrate anti-corruption measures in all spheres, from their responses to the financial crisis and climate change to commitments by the international community to eradicate poverty. Transparency International advocates stricter implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption, the only global initiative that provides a framework for putting an end to corruption. Notable among decliners over the past year are some of the countries most affected by a financial crisis precipitated by transparency and integrity deficits. Among those improving in the past year, the general absence of OECD states underlines the fact that all nations need to bolster their good governance mechanisms. The message is clear: across the globe, transparency and accountability are critical to restoring trust and turning back the tide of corruption. Without them, global policy solutions to many global crises are at risk.
(Photo: K. Ogden Photography)
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