These assessments also depend on how you define corruption. In many countries corruption has effectively been legalised.

If it is legal to engage in activities that are manifestly corrupt, can a country be technically called corrupt?

An interesting question.

Let’s look at a case in point, the United States.

For many years, conservative politicians in the USA have been stacking the Supreme Court with sympathetic judges.

Several years ago the Supreme Court handed down a decision that dramatically reshaped the business of politics in the USA.

In its Citizens v Federal Election Commission decision, the court opened the campaign spending floodgates by ruling that political spending was protected under the first amendment of the Constitution, meaning corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money on political activities without having to disclose them publicly.

Its ramifications reach well beyond the USA.

This decision was in part engineered by the big corporations and it means that democracy is effectively on life support in the USA.

A small group of wealthy donors have gained huge influence over elections and maintain that influence once candidates take office.

Of the billions spent i federal elections since the court decision in 2010, nearly 60% of the money has come from 195 super wealthy individuals.

They now effectively run the USA.

It is now common for lawyers representing corporate interests to sit in on legislative drafting sessions to ensure that the wording of new laws favour them and remove obstacles to the plans of the corporate businesses they represent.

Many states in the USA now routinely rubber stamp laws which have written in their entirety by corporate lawyers.

Is that corruption, or what?

And remember, the USA, by virtue of its massive expenditure on its military, is still the world’s sheriff.

We now have a president and government on the payroll of the world’s biggest corporations.

It kind of makes the amateur kleptomaniacs in Papua New Guinea’s patriarchal government look puny.

But of course in the USA it’s legal, so it’s not corruption after all, is it?

PS: According to the 2017 statistics New Zealand and Denmark are in a dead heat for the least corrupt country in the world. Australia doesn’t make the top ten.