Turkey makes progress in corruption control, regresses in rule of law

Turkey’s percentile rank for the category of freedom of speech and accountability, one of the six key governance indicators used in the research, rose to 41.8 percent, from 34.0 in 1996. Percentile rank indicates the percentage of the 212 countries studied that rate below the rank of a specific country. Higher values indicate better governance ratings. Thus, Turkey ranks higher than 41.8 percent of the countries surveyed.

Turkey’s percentile rank in the control of corruption category rose to 57.8 from 59.4 in 1996. The indicator measuring political instability and violence rose to 20.7 last year from 8.7 in 1996. However, the supremacy of the rule of law fell to 53.3 from 55.2 in the same period, while the quality of regulatory institutions fell to 59.7 from 68.3. Government effectiveness in Turkey, which stood at 55 in 1996 rose to 63.5 in 2007.

Developing countries move forward in controlling corruption

According to the World Bank report, many developing country governments are making important gains in the control of corruption.

Over a dozen emerging countries, including Slovenia, Chile, Botswana, Estonia, Uruguay, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mauritius and Costa Rica score higher on key dimensions of governance than industrialized countries such as Greece or Italy. And in many cases these differences are statistically significant.

Between 2002 and 2007, the indicators show sharp improvements in governance, along with reversals. Examples include strong improvements in freedom of speech and accountability in countries such as Ukraine and Haiti; improvements in Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism in Argentina; and improvements in Control of Corruption in Georgia and Tanzania.

But despite governance gains in some countries, overall quality of governance around the world has not improved much over the past decade, according to the report. This year’s study is the seventh update of the WGI, a decade-long effort by researchers to build and update the most comprehensive cross-country set of governance indicators currently available.