The Netherlands ranks fifth in 2015 global corruption index

The Netherlands takes a respectable fifth place in the annual worldwide corruption ranking. The Dutch have apparently bettered themselves compared to 2014, when they took eighth place.

The figures come from the 2015 edition of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which states that 68 percent of countries worldwide have a serious corruption problem. Half of the G20 nations are among them.

However, a larger portion of countries improved their standing compared to countries that did worse than the year before.

Overall, two-thirds of the 168 countries on the 2015 index scored below 50, on a scale from 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 100 (perceived to be very clean). Anything less than 50 is considered to be insufficient.

Some countries have improved in recent years. Greece, Senegal and the UK are among those that have seen a significant increase in scores since 2012. Others, including Australia, Brazil, Libya, Spain and Turkey, have deteriorated.

Many "clean" countries have dodgy records overseas

The corruption report bases a country’s score on what takes place inside the national borders, and does not take into consideration how a country operates in other nations.

Northern Europe, for example, does very well in the index with four of the top five countries. But just because a country has a clean public sector at home, doesn’t mean it isn’t linked to corruption elsewhere.

Take Sweden for instance, which is in third place in the index. The Swedish-Finnish firm TeliaSonera, more than one-third of which is owned by the Swedish state, is facing allegations that it paid millions of dollars in bribes to secure business in Uzbekistan, which comes in at 153rd in the index.

More recently, the Brazilian justice system started an investigation into the alleged bribery surrounding the sale of 36 Swedish fighter jets to Brazil. Sweden isn’t the only "clean" country to be linked to questionable behaviour overseas.

As research by Transparency International shows, half of all OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) are violating their international obligations to crack down on bribery by their companies abroad.

The top 10 least corrupt countries

1)    Denmark        
2)    Finland        
3)    Sweden        
4)    New Zealand    
5)    Netherlands    
5)    Norway        
7)    Switzerland    
8)    Singapore    
9)    Canada        
10)    Germany        
10)    Luxembourg    
10)    United Kingdom