Post by benson on Feb 24, 2017 12:36:39 GMT
Corruption is as invisible as it is pervasive. Public trust is easily professed on public forums, and just as easily betrayed in back rooms. Money and favours influence decisions without leaving a trace. Pecunia non olet.
Yet corruption is not a victimless crime. Cutting corners on good governance costs money, endangers lives and erodes the public trust that oils the machinery of state in modern democracies.
So how to fight it? Corruption feeds off apathy and thrives in the shadows. It abhors the full glare of public attention. It is not a coincidence that the global organisation dedicated to its demise is called Transparency International.
TI produces annual reports, scorecards and a heat map of corruption around the world. The least corrupt countries, in the organisation's 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index, were New Zealand and Denmark, followed closely by the other Nordic countries. Most corrupt? Somalia, with South Sudan and North Korea not far behind.
The French subsidiary of TI went one step further, and visualised the corruption in France on a map. Linking corruption to specific locations suddenly gives the various crimes caught under that term a certain weight and heft – and increases its visibility.
This Cartographie des affaires de corruption immediately points to a number of corruption hot spots: two concentrated zones in Paris and the North (near the Belgian border), and in and around Bordeaux in the southwest. There is a string of malfeasance stretching along the Mediterranean coast, and the heavily dotted island of Corsica seems particularly prone to corruption.
Yet corruption is not a victimless crime. Cutting corners on good governance costs money, endangers lives and erodes the public trust that oils the machinery of state in modern democracies.
So how to fight it? Corruption feeds off apathy and thrives in the shadows. It abhors the full glare of public attention. It is not a coincidence that the global organisation dedicated to its demise is called Transparency International.
TI produces annual reports, scorecards and a heat map of corruption around the world. The least corrupt countries, in the organisation's 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index, were New Zealand and Denmark, followed closely by the other Nordic countries. Most corrupt? Somalia, with South Sudan and North Korea not far behind.
The French subsidiary of TI went one step further, and visualised the corruption in France on a map. Linking corruption to specific locations suddenly gives the various crimes caught under that term a certain weight and heft – and increases its visibility.
This Cartographie des affaires de corruption immediately points to a number of corruption hot spots: two concentrated zones in Paris and the North (near the Belgian border), and in and around Bordeaux in the southwest. There is a string of malfeasance stretching along the Mediterranean coast, and the heavily dotted island of Corsica seems particularly prone to corruption.
