Chile is ranked as the most transparent in Latin America

Also, the country ranked third in the Americas, after Canada and Barbados.


Transparency International, a global organization which fights against corruption, has published the results of its latest Corruption Perceptions Index 2010, a survey which measures corruption according to the degree to which it is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians.

The study ranks countries on a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 points means very transparent and zero points mean highly corrupt.

This year’s ranking is led by Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore who each received 9.3 points. The most corrupt countries according to this ranking are Afghanistan, Myanmar and Iraq (1.4 points each), and Somalia, which received 1.1 points.

Chile was ranked 21 among a total of 178 nations, higher than the United States, France, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. Also, for the first time in five years Chile scored 7.2 points, 0.5 higher than last year, ranking as the third least corrupt country in America after Canada (ranked 6) and Barbados (17).

Alejandro Salas, head of the Americas department of Transparency International, attributed Chile’s improvement to the e-government system that the Chilean administration has implemented during recent years which features transparent public procurement systems and access to public information laws which help to fight corruption, he explained in an interview with local newspaper La Tercera.

The index is based on surveys of entrepreneurs and experts which were carried out between January 2009 and September 2010.