Australia remains in 13th place for the fourth year running in Transparency International's latest Corruption Perception Index (CPI) released earlier this year. Although Australia's CPI score remained stable at 77 this year, it is still significantly lower than its 2012 score of 85.
The Index, which ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and business leaders uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 is the 'cleanest' and 0 is the 'most corrupt'.
This year Demark replaced New Zealand as the country assessed as being the least corrupt, with a score of 88. New Zealand's score dropped two points to 87. Somalia continued to be the poorest performing country, achieving a score of just 10. Other countries in the top 10 include Finland, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Canada and Luxenburg, which all had scores over 80.
The Asia Pacific region, in which Australia sits, has maintained a score of 44 for the past three years, indicating the region as a whole is making little to no improvement. The best performing region was Western Europe and European Union with a score of 66.