The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of Latvia this year is 59, the same as last year.
Last year Latvia was in 36th place among the countries included in the list, whereas this year it has slipped to 39th. The 2021 ranking was Latvia's highest. Over the past 10 years, Latvia's ranking has improved by ten points.
Lithuania is in the 33rd place and Estonia is in the 14th place.
This year, Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand rank highest. Syria, South Sudan, and Somalia rank lowest, unchanged from last year.
Head of Latvia's transparency organization Delna, Inese Tauriņa, said in a statement that Latvia must implement corruption combating decisions more sternly, making them a priority at the state level.
Latvia's performance indicates that Latvia will fail to meet the National Development Plan for 2021-2027 target of 64 points in 2024 and 67 points in 2027. This conviction is also magnified by the fact that the declaration by the new government of the Krišjānis Kariņš (New Unity), while assessing the importance of reducing corruption in the strengthening of the common national security, does not describe the anticorruption measures to be taken.
In the area of political integrity, Latvia's indicator (49 out of 100 points) is the lowest in the EU and ranks Latvia at one level with Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Malta, Hungary, and Romania, lagging Estonia by 26 points and Lithuania by 9 points. In the field of business integrity, the indicator is 52 points out of 100.
That points to the fact that undocumented additional payments are often made — bribes — to receive something in return.
The assessment of business integrity is also negatively affected by scandals of misuse and waste of public resources and EU funds and distortion of competition in different sectors of the economy and at levels of responsibility for officials, from municipalities to the national level.
Inese Tauriņa, director of Delna, stressed that Latvia needs to act more decisively than it has done so far in identifying the prevention and combating of corruption as a national priority in day-to-day work.
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts, using a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is very corrupt and 100 is very clean.
