Windy, as it has been for the last two or three days. No rain, although we probably could use it. Deck is pretty sheltered. Very comfortable, as the cats have discovered when we forget to put the cushions away. Can be quite irritable about having to give up a chair to a human.
TRNC apparently has a ranking in the annual corruption perception index for 2022, although it doesn’t appear in the public list. Not entirely surprisingly it ranks an unenviable 140 out of 180, comparable to Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan. Certainly a country where a kind of tribalism, knowing people, having contacts matters, although this is also true in the Republic of Cyprus (South), which ranks 51st, tied with Greece. There are actually a fair number of ties in the index, which means the ranking can drop quite quickly without a big drop in the raw score, making the score more important than the rank.
Have always been somewhat reluctant to overrate the importance of position in the index simply because it is PERCEIVED corruption. Granted, the questionnaires are given to business people and “experts” (undefined) rather than being distributed generally, but perceptions can be affected by things other than actual corruption - economic decline, targeted press coverage or a specific major scandal for example. Canada stands now at fourteenth and its score has dropped noticeably over the past ten years, although not since last year. But has real corruption changed significantly over this time?
Posts
