Trinidad and To­ba­go has placed 85 out of 183 coun­tries in the lat­est Cor­rup­tion Per­cep­tion In­dex (CPI), chair­man of Trinidad and To­ba­go Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute, Dion Ab­dool, has re­vealed.

Ab­dool made the state­ment this morn­ing at the launch of the 2019 CPI, at the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness in Mt Hope.

The av­er­age score for the CPI this year was 43.

T&T scored 40.

In the 2018 CPI, T&T re­ceived a score of 41 and was ranked 78.

The in­dex ranks coun­tries and ter­ri­to­ries by their per­ceived lev­els of pub­lic sec­tor cor­rup­tion, ac­cord­ing to ex­perts and busi­ness peo­ple.

It us­es a scale of ze­ro to 100, where ze­ro is high­ly cor­rupt and 100 is very clean.

More than two-thirds of coun­tries score be­low 50 on this year’s CPI, with an av­er­age score of just 43. Sim­i­lar to pre­vi­ous years, the da­ta shows that de­spite some progress, a ma­jor­i­ty of coun­tries are still fail­ing to tack­le pub­lic sec­tor cor­rup­tion ef­fec­tive­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to the CPI, the top coun­tries are New Zealand and Den­mark, with scores of 87 each, fol­lowed by Fin­land (86), Sin­ga­pore (85), Swe­den (85) and Switzer­land (85).

The bot­tom coun­tries are So­ma­lia, South Su­dan and Syr­ia with scores of 9, 12 and 13, re­spec­tive­ly

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Sto­ry by JOEL JULIEN