Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan are the least corrupt economies in Asia, where the problem remains embedded despite being a key trigger for the regional financial crisis in 1997, a report said.
Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Thailand, the Philippines and China were perceived the most corrupt, with Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan falling just below the average, the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) said in its latest survey on corruption.
"One would have hoped that the economic crisis that hit the Asian region in 1997 would have been a wakeup call to the problem of corruption," PERC said.
"Unfortunately, our survey indicates that the problem ... has not really improved very much during the past four years," the Hong Kong-based consultancy said.
In some countries, corruption even worsened compared to the pre-crisis year.
Grading countries from a scale of zero to 10, with zero being the best grade possible and 10 the worst, PERC said tiny but affluent Singapore maintained its squeaky-clean image with a score of 0.83. Taiwan earned a score of 6.0.
Singapore's grade beat the 1.77 mark for the US and 1.72 for Australia -- two countries surveyed by PERC for purposes of obtaining an outside benchmark on how corruption is perceived as a problem in developed economies.
Japan was in second place with a score of 2.50 and Hong Kong came in third with a grade of 3.77, deteriorating from 2.49 last year.
Hong Kong's political, economic and geographical links to China, where corruption is much more rampant, remain a challenge for the special administrative region, PERC said.
At the other extreme of the corruption scale was Vietnam, with a grade of 9.75, followed by Indonesia with 9.50, India with 9.25, the Philippines with 9.0, Thailand with 8.55 and China with 7.88.
South Korea was graded at 7.00 while Malaysia got 6.0.
Aside from Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan, "the grades for virtually all other countries covered by our survey are below average, defined in our instructions as a score of five," it said.
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