According to Arman Tleukenov, the spokesperson of the Anti-Corruption Agency, Kazakhstan isn’t one of the most corrupt countries on the globe, although U.S. News, an American media outlet, put the country in 75th place on its list of corrupt countries.
What is wrong with the rating? As Tleukenov noted, even though the survey by U.S. News has nothing to do with official ratings for corruption in the world, Kazakhstani media outlets have spread this news without proper fact-checking.
«The survey has no reliable methodology for evaluation of how big the problem of corruption is in different states and doesn’t even pursue this goal,» the official wrote on his Facebook page.
He also underlined that although there are more than 190 member states to the U.N., the survey covered just 87 countries.
«In this survey respondents of 36 countries evaluated 87 countries. This means that citizens of 51 countries didn’t take part in this survey. It is highly possible that participants of the survey have never visited Kazakhstan and just cited that they have heard from other people or seen in open sources, including the movie Borat,» Tleukenov said.
What do we know about the survey? The anti-corruption agency insists that the survey’s goal is to evaluate people’s perception of countries to see if they are ready to visit them or even live there. This means that the survey wasn’t designed to evaluate corruption.
«The survey includes ten categories. No problem with the Tourism or Open for Business categories but what does the category Sexy have to do with corruption? According to the survey’s authors, we aren’t that sexy. The score is just 3.7. You can check it out in screen shots,» Tleukenov wrote.
What is the level of corruption in reality? According to the anti-corruption agency, they usually rely on corruption perception indexes by Transparency International or World Justice Project.
«As the comparative analyses shows the U.S. News survey often contradicts other global indexes. For instance, in this rating, Kazakhstan is ranked 75th, Egypt 47th, Ukraine 48th, the Philippines 56th, Azerbaijan 56th, Uzbekistan 68th and Honduras 70th. However, the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International shows different results: Kazakhstan holds 101st position, Egypt 130th, Ukraine and the Philippines 116th, Uzbekistan 126th and Honduras 157th,» he wrote.
The context. On August 10, Kursiv wrote that Kazakhstan was ranked 75th on the list of the most corrupt countries in the world by U.S. News. In this rating, the level of corruption goes up from the beginning of the list to its end.
Kazakhstan was ranked 75th between Kenya (74) and Guatemala (76).
What countries are the least corrupt? Switzerland, Canada and Sweden have the lowest corruption in the world, followed by Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Belgium and Norway, while Russia is the most corrupt country (87th), according to the U.S. News.
In May, Natalya Goduniva, head of the Supreme Audit Chamber of Kazakhstan said that the number of poor people in the country was growing. Kazakhstanis tend to take more loans for living rather than for the development of business. Moreover, despite the government announcing thousands of new jobs, the number of jobless was increasing as well.
Earlier this year, Senate speaker Maulen Ashimbayev confirmed that Kazakhstan’s position in the rating for sustainable development goals declined to the level of 2020. He also said that the state faces two key challenges: poor people and a shortage of water.
As the official noted, Kazakhstan joined the sustainable goals in 2015 and set 17 goals it is currently pursuing. Even though Kazakhstan has done a lot toward reaching these goals over the past 30 years, the country’s position in this sphere worsened because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, Kazakhstan was ranked 66 out of 166 countries, although in 2021 it was 59th and then 65th in 2022.
