A fresh report by global watchdog Transparency International looks at the correlation between corruption levels and nations' response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

The study highlights the impact of corruption on government responses to COVID-19, looking at how corruption have impacted many countries' investment in health care and the extent to which democratic norms and institutions have been weakened during the pandemic.

Transparency International says corruption is prevalent across the COVID-19 response, from bribery for tests and treatment right down to public procurement of medical supplies.

"What you see is that the procurement of protection equipment — masks, ventilators and so on — is not being handled transparently," Daniel Eriksson, interim managing director of Transparency International, told DW. "That makes it very attractive for corrupt people to siphon off money into their own pockets, thereby making themselves rich at the cost of the population at large — corruption in this case actually kills people."

Corruption kills people

The report points to "countless lives lost due to the insidious effects of corruption undermining a fair and equitable global response" to the pandemic.

TI's analysis says corruption has diverted funds from much needed investment in health care, leaving some communities without doctors, equipment and also clinics and hospitals.

"COVID-19 is not just a health and economic crisis; it's a corruption crisis and one that we're currently failing to manage," TI Chair Delia Ferreira Rubio said in press release.

Not much progress

While analyzing developments in 2020, Transparency International ranked 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public-sector corruption as seen by experts and businesspeople.

Perceived corruption levels may not always be the same as actual corruption levels, but TI's 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) is able to highlight the general impact of corruption on government activities in the countries it reviews.

The study provides a rather grim picture of the state of affairs worldwide, saying that most countries have made little or no progress in tackling corruption in nearly a decade and adding that the current pandemic exacerbated the situation in many nations.

The CPI uses a scale of zero to 100 to assess the performance of individual nations, with zero meaning highly corrupt and nations scoring close to 100 points being almost free of corruption.

TI says it's frustrating to see that the average score in 2020 was only 43 points, with two-thirds of the 180 countries reviewed scoring below 50 points.

Almost half of all countries have been stagnant in the CPI table for about a decade; so all of these nations have failed to move the needle toward combating public-sector corruption more efficiently. The lowest-scoring region in 2020 was sub-Saharan Africa at 32 points on average. The European Union and Western Europe at large came out on top, being the highest-scoring region at 66 points.

Denmark leads the field

A look at individual nations reveals that the three countries with the lowest perceived corruption levels are Denmark, New Zealand and Finland — with South Sudan, Somalia and Syria being at the other end of the spectrum.

Germany takes 9th position again in 2020, scoring 80 points. What's interesting to note is that the United States only scores 67 points, seeing it reach its lowest position (No. 25) on the index since 2012. Transparency International points out in its summary that oversight procedures concerning the unprecedented $1 trillion (€830 billion) COVID-19 relief package "raised serious anti-corruption concerns and marked a significant retreat from longstanding democratic norms promoting accountable government."

TI concludes that "higher levels of corruption tend to be the worst perpetrators of rule-of-law breaches while managing the COVID-19 crisis" and other societal challenges.

"The more democratic and open a country is, the more capable it is of tackling corruption very quickly. We've seen several countries weaken human rights including free speech, and with it they are also attacking the ability of those countries to prevent corruption," TI's Daniel Eriksson told DW.