Transparency International on Tuesday last week published the results of its 2018 Corruption Perception Index. Taiwan ranked 31 out of 180 countries surveyed: two places below last year’s score.
Although Taiwan was preceded only by Hong Kong and Japan in East Asia, the lower ranking is a warning sign.
The index is recognized worldwide. Transparency International has been publishing it every year since 1995 and it has become an important tool for the global anti-corruption movement. The index is not compiled from a single opinion poll, but rather from 13 separate international surveys and assessments.
The statistics are weighted to create a composite corruption index. One of its most important aspects is that it is a “lagging indicator”: It produces a “rear mirror effect” — an appraisal of a government’s performance toward stamping out corruption over one to two years, as assessed by businesspeople and analysts.
For this reason, last year’s index should be read as a mid-term evaluation of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) performance during her administration’s first year in power from 2016. Thirty-first out of 180 is a passable result, but it should be taken as an early warning. Just think, if a national opinion poll had been conducted, the ranking would perhaps have been even lower, as the public’s level of trust in the public sector is low.
In the coming few years, a raft of large-scale domestic engineering and construction projects are to provide an important criterion for Transparency International and other organizations to evaluate Taiwan’s performance.
In the push to defeat government-level corruption, there is no magic panacea. It requires political will, a systemic approach, and alignment with international norms and standards.
At the moment, the global anti-corruption movement is focused on large-scale corruption, dirty money, and transnational flows and people engagement.
The Tsai administration has to date set aside NT$800 billion (US$26.02 billion) for the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program, the indigenous submarine program and other large public works projects. Given the huge sums involved, this is a critical time for Taiwan’s corruption-busting apparatus.
If the government manages to implement the above-mentioned three elements crucial for fighting corruption and to set up a genuinely effective anti-corruption framework that meets international standards, it could not only curb scandals and abuses of the system, but also ensure that Taiwan scores favorably with international governance monitoring organizations.
Changes in the leadership of the Ministry of Justice’s Agency Against Corruption (AAC) are frequent and the incoming director-general is the fifth in the 7.5 years since the agency’s establishment. While a leadership change should present no problem, policy consistency and forward-looking planning are necessary.
During his term, outgoing AAC Director-General Chu Chia-chi (朱家崎) initiated the first review of Taiwan’s implementation of the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), which received praise from the five members of the international expert panel. Unfortunately, this was not included in the latest Corruption Perception Index due to the lag built into it.
It would be a pity if the review was put away in a drawer somewhere. The AAC must train staff to handle international exchanges, and send personnel abroad for training and to advertise Taiwan’s development of ethical government based on the national review of Taiwan’s UNCAC implementation.
Ernie Ko is a member of Transparency International’s Membership Accreditation Committee.
Translated by Edward Jones and Perry Svensson
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
President-elect William Lai (賴清德) is to accede to the presidency this month at a time when the international order is in its greatest flux in three decades. Lai must navigate the ship of state through the choppy waters of an assertive China that is refusing to play by the rules, challenging the territorial claims of multiple nations and increasing its pressure on Taiwan. It is widely held in democratic capitals that Taiwan is important to the maintenance and survival of the liberal international order. Taiwan is strategically located, hemming China’s People’s Liberation Army inside the first island chain, preventing it from
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past