According to yet another survey from Transparency International (TI), Iceland is now tied for 8th place with Australia and Canada in the category of least corrupt countries, down from 7th place not six weeks ago.
New Zealand, Denmark, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland and the Netherlands, in that order, are all less corrupt than Iceland, according to TI. Iceland is tied for 8th place with Australia and Canada, yet has the lowest “confidence rating” of these three 8th place countries. However, in the last week of September, Iceland was in 7th place. It has ranked as high as first place as recently as 2005.
TI again touted the accuracy of its methodology, saying they use 13 individual surveys to gather data. As Grapevine pointed out, not every country polled was subjected to all 13 surveys last September, and in fact Iceland was only covered by five of a possible 13 surveys, all of them measuring economic vitality. This was observable because TI made their survey data clear. This time around, however, their survey data (.pdf file) only states how many countries were covered by each survey; not which countries.
How accurate TI’s methods are has been questioned by some Icelandic pundits, as the country was ranked least corrupt in 2005, at a time when newly privatized banks had recently been sold to family members of politicians responsible for privatizing the banks in the first place.