There is a growing consensus about the wide-ranging costs of corruption, with several non-government organisations (NGOs) incorporating anti-corruption measures into broader policy directives to reflect this far-reaching impact. In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) included the need to reduce corruption and bribery into its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which it hopes will guide policymaking in both developing and developed economies. The issue is set to gain even more traction in 2016, when London hosts an international summit focusing on anti-corruption measures.
How prevalent is corruption in Latin America and how have governments fared in efforts to tackle corrupt practices in the past decade? Finding an accurate answer to these questions is difficult, as corruption is, by its very nature, tricky to measure. It usually leaves no paper trail and assessments of the level of corruption in a particular country tend to depend on perceptions of corruption, which are likely to be tainted by individual cases and experience.
In addition, corruption in one area – for example, in the local police force – is not necessarily an indication that corruption is widespread in other institutions.
That said, several international organisations have made methodological progress in recent years in their efforts to rank countries according to their comparative transparency. The Berlin-based NGO Transparency International (TI) publishes the most comprehensive and well-regarded international index – the Annual Corruption Perceptions Index – which scores and ranks countries on how corrupt the public sector is perceived to be.