Epress.am News from Armenia
Corruption has increased over the last three years, say 6 out of 10 people around the world, and one in four report paying bribes in the last year, according to the findings of the 2010 Global Corruption Barometer (GCB), a worldwide public opinion survey on corruption released today, Dec. 9, on International Anti-Corruption Day by Transparency International.
In Armenia, half of the respondents believe that the level of corruption has increased over the past three years and only 15% believe that it has decreased, whereas 35% think there was no change. According to the findings, the most corrupt area in Armenia is perceived to be the education system, followed by the police and judiciary equally. Interestingly, no other country covered in the 2010 GCB named the education system as the most corrupt sector.
The actions of the Armenian government in the fight against corruption was considered ineffective by 53% of respondents and effective by only 27%. Further, 27% of Armenian respondents considered government’s actions as neither effective nor ineffective. In this aspect, according to the official press release, there is a slight setback: in 2009, 48% of Armenian respondents considered the Armenian government’s actions to be ineffective, while 38% deemed them effective.
In general, however, the “NIS+” (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Ukraine and Mongolia) region is the most “optimistic” among the 8 world regions surveyed. Here, only 45% of respondents believe that corruption has increased in the past three years, compared to 73% in the “EU+” (EU countries plus Norway, Iceland and Switzerland) region. Actually, the most “optimistic” country surveyed is Georgia — only 9% of respondents believed that corruption had increased over the past 3 years, whereas 78% believe that it had decreased.
The 2010 GCB included 86 countries with more than 91,500 people interviewed. The interviews in Armenia were conducted June 10–20, 2010, with 1,000 households by phone. This is the second year that Armenia is included in the GCB report.