Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union

E2: Environmental statistics and accounts; sustainable development

e-mail contact : ESTAT-SDG-MONITORING@ec.europa.eu

The indicator is part of the EU Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicator set. It is used to monitor progress towards SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions, which is embedded in the European Commission’s Priorities under European way of life and European democracy.

The Goal 16 calls for peaceful and inclusive societies based on respect for human rights, protection of the most vulnerable, the rule of law and good governance at all levels. It also envisions transparent, effective and accountable institutions, which promote non-discriminatory laws and policies, combat corruption, bribery and organised crime and prevent violence, terrorism and crime.

The indicator can be considered as similar to global SDG indicator 16.5.2 "Proportion of businesses who had at least one contact with a public official and who paid a bribe to a public official, or were asked for a bribe by these public officials, during the previous 12 months".

Corruption inflicts financial damage by lowering investment levels, hampering the fair operation of the internal market and reducing public finances. It also causes social harm as organised crime groups use corruption to commit other serious crimes, such as trafficking in drugs and human beings. As there is no meaningful way to assess absolute levels of corruption in countries or territories on the basis of hard empirical data, capturing perceptions of corruption of those in a position to offer assessments of public sector corruption is so far the most reliable method of comparing relative corruption levels across countries.

The indicator is a composite index based on a combination of surveys and assessments of corruption from 13 different sources and scores and ranks countries based on how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be, with a score of 0 representing a very high level of corruption and a score of 100 representing a very clean country. The sources of information used for the 2016 CPI are based on data gathered in the 24 months preceding the publication of the index. The CPI includes only sources that provide a score for a set of countries/territories and that measure perceptions of corruption in the public sector. For a country/territory to be included in the ranking, it must be included in a minimum of three of the CPI’s data sources. The CPI is published by Transparency International.

Score scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean)

Calendar year

Indicator from non-ESS sources. For assessment of accuracy please refer to the original source (see link to external data source and metadata in section “Annexes”).

Transparency International

Data source: Transparency International Publication

Data provider: Transparency International

Every year

Indicator is updated annually.

T+1 year

New data points are disseminated within one year after the reference year.

All EU MS

Indicator as published by Eurostat covers all EU Member States plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Türkiye, Russia, the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Publications by Transparency International cover most countries of the world.

All EU MS

Data are comparable between all EU Member States respectively other presented countries.

5 to 10 years

Presented time series starts in 2012. Older data available from Transparency International was omitted due to limited comparability to recent data.

> 4 data points

Length of comparable time series without methodological break is longer than 4 data points.

Analysis of indicator is presented in Eurostat's annual monitoring report on Sustainable development in the EU (progress towards SDGs in the EU context).

See table sdg_16_50

Eurostat dedicated section on SDGs: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/sdi/overview

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