Many Of The Countries Negotiating ACTA In Secret Saw Their Corruption Perception Increase

While there are certainly many other factors that go into such rankings, Jamie Love points us to the news that many of the countries negotiating ACTA in secret over the past few years have had their perceived corruption ratings increase. Transparency International famously puts out its Corruption Perceptions Index each year, highlighting how people view their own governments in terms of corruption. Again, obviously, there are many other factors that go into such ratings, but it does seem rather telling that so many of the countries that have very publicly hid behind bogus claims to avoid publicly discussing an agreement that will impact many people, are somehow viewed as more corrupt than in the past.

Now, I should note that Love says that 34 of the 37 participants had their corruption perception increase (the blog post claims only Morocco, Japan and Canada had better ratings), but that's not actually the case. First, I believe they missed Singapore, which also had a slightly better rating. Separately, 27 of the 37 countries are lumped together as "the EU," which apparently negotiated as a single entity. However, if you go through all 27 EU countries, it is worth noting that six of the 27 show slight improvements in their corruption perception, and another five stayed flat. Still, that does mean that 15 of the 27 EU countries did appear more corrupt. That said, since the EU negotiated as a single entity, it's a little tricky to judge how ACTA negotiations reflected on any individual country. For example, with a country like Malta, did anyone there really even care about ACTA? Separately, it's worth noting that many of the changes are small, and perhaps within the margin of error on such a rating system.

Either way, at the very least, it can be suggested that the majority of countries involved saw their ratings get worse -- and that's especially true of the countries that were heavily involved in the negotiations.

One quick note: it's a bit confusing but the Corruption Perception Index measures on a 0 to 10 scale, with 10 being "clean" and 0 being "highly corrupt." So, when I claim, above, that their "perceived corruption ratings increased," it means the score on the corruption scale declined. In other words, a decline in the Corruption Perception Index actually means an increase in perceived corruption (which suggests the index is misnamed somewhat...).

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Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101027/04085411604/many-of-the-countries-negotiating-acta-in-secret-saw-their-corruption-perception-increase.shtml

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