A press conference was held at 1:00 pm, on October 26, 2010, at Congress Hotel, where Varuzhan Hoktanyan, Executive Director of Transparency International Anti-corruption Center presented Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2010. The CPI, released annually since 1995, looks at public sector corruption based on expert assessments and opinion surveys. The 2010 CPI ranked 178 countries and draws on 13 different polls and surveys from 10 independent institutions. The scale ranked from 0-10, where 0 is totally corrupted and 10 is non-corrupted. Based on this assessment, up to one third of 178 countries are ranked to have lower index than 5points, which marks the importance and urgency of this issue.  The 2010 CPI shows that less corrupted countries include Denmark (9.3), New Zealand (9.3), Singapore (9.3). Other Scandinavian countries as well included in the first 10s list are Sweden (9.2), Norway (8.6), Finland (9.2). Also countries involved in the first 10 are the Netherlands (8.8), Canada (8.9), Switzerland (8.7),Australia (8.7).

Estonia ranks the highest among ex-Soviet countries with 6.5 points. In case of Armenia slow regress has been marked due to having 2.6 points in 2010 as compared to 2009 - 2.7 points. With these points Armenia ranks among countries like Eritrea, Madagascar and Niger.

Concerning the process of CPI measurements, Varuzhan Hoktanyan explained that the researches are based on the corruption perception of the experts' and entrepreneurs' from developed, as well as developing countries. These experts and entrepreneurs might be either living in the particular country under the investigation or out of it, but the interesting thing was that their viewpoint about the same country's state of corruption to a great extent coincided.     

Sofya Manukyan

Source: www.hra.am