Is Ukraine The Most Corrupt Country In Europe?

Since its founding in the early 1990s, global non-profit Transparency International has been working to track corruption and measure its impact on a global scale. For its 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, researchers surveyed 114,000 respondents from 107 countries and asked whether they had paid a bribe in the last year.

The result was a detailed look at off-the-books payments that gives readers an understanding of how bribery is shaping global economies. For example, in European countries such as Ukraine, Lithuania and Serbia, nearly three in every 10 respondents admitted to paying a bribe in the last 12 months.

In this PYMNTS.com Data Point, we let you go behind the data to examine Transparency International’s European findings. Simply hover your cursor over the map to receive a country-by-country breakdown of each country’s bribery levels.

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The high levels of reported bribery in certain eastern European nations don’t paint the whole picture in those countries. In Serbia, the majority of respondents said they believed corruption levels were decreasing in their country. By comparison, consumers in Ukraine and Lithuania indicated bribery levels were on the rise.

Other European economies remain largely insulated from the issue. Less than 5 percent of respondents in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Spain admitted to paying a bribe in the last year. Further, consumers in Italy, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom all reported bribery levels of less than 10 percent.

The survey also took a look at how global consumers perceived corruption in their countries. Perhaps due to the economic turmoil in the continent, four of the top five countries where negative perceptions of government were most common came from Europe. Greece led the survey, with 83 percent echoing this sentiment. Israel was the only non-European nation in the top five.

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All data was excluded for France, Germany and Luxembourg due to what the organization called “validity concerns.”

For more insights into global corruption, download the full report here or view our corresponding Data Point here.