The country has slid in Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index, amid the intensification in the Communist-ruled country in the last months of a major anti-graft campaign.
Highly reliant on foreign investment, Vietnam dropped to rank 83 last year in the index of 180 countries from 77 in 2022, and its score fell to 41 from 42, according to a 0-100 scale where 0 means highly corrupt. The index ranks countries by their perceived levels of public-sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople.Vietnam’s lower score coincided with last year’s major crackdown on corruption which led to arrests and jail terms for deputy ministers, investigations of hundreds of officials and the dismissal of then-president Nguyen Xuan Phuc.
Vietnam’s poorer showing in the index follows improvements in the previous two years, but still leaves the country in a better position than many of its regional peers, with Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand considered more corrupt. — Reuters
