MANILA, Philippines – Despite persistent and aggressive efforts on the part of government to flush out corruption, the Philippines still scored 34 out of 100 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2012. It also ranked 105th out of 176 countries and territories that were assessed globally.

The ranking is based on how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived. In its scale, Transparency International says that 0 means “highly corrupt” (the lowest score a country could possibly have), while 100 (the highest score) means “very clean.”

The Philippines is in the same category as the countries of Mexico, Mali, Algeria, Armenia, Bolivia, Gambia, and Kosovo.

Among ASEAN countries, the only ones worse than the Philippines in terms of perceptions of corruption are Indonesia (ranked 118, with a score of 32), Vietnam (123rd, with a score of 31), Cambodia (157th, with a score of 22), Laos (160th, with a score of 21), and Myanmar (172nd, with a score of 15).

Earlier, a 2012 Social Weather Stations Survey of Enterprises on Corruption showed that executives who saw “a lot” of corruption in the public sector fell from 64% in 2009 to 42% in 2012.

In the same survey, the SWS noted that the level of perceived public sector corruption remained at 60% or more since the first such survey in 2000. The government’s rating under this category, then, is the best it has gotten in over a decade. Yet more work needs to be done in fighting perceptions of corruption. – Rappler.com