> My original comment was that the notion that Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe leading up to the current events is not supported by either the ar

> My original comment was that the notion that Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe leading up to the current events is not supported by either the article used as a reference nor the underlying data source that the article itself used. The articles and arguments were plenty in the Western press in the years following 2014. All of them disappeared suddenly when the war started and Ukraine ended up on the side that West supports. Then again that's no surprise 'They are bastards but they are our bastards' have been de facto modus operandi of the Angloamerican West since Truman. > Regardless, it would hopefully be part of the TI's job to calibrate these cultural norms out in order to compare across the world. Unfortunately it won't, because it has another job - to publicize whomever supplies its funding wants. Its the same thing with the funding bias in science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_bias You can see the same thing in the 'university rankings'. These are generally done and publicized by mainly Angloamerican institutions, who, not surprisingly, rank a lot of Angloamerican universities at the top. Most of those universities also tend to be private ones. Its both advertising and catering to those universities - these rankings attract international students to those private universities, who then support these institutions in direct or indirect ways with funding. This is why non-Angloamerican, especially non-private universities have scarce spots in these rankings as well. Its just business. > Randian biases in the corruption metric. That's a completely valid point, but my reference of the Nordic countries was just to illustrate that I do not think that is quite the case here I would say that its more a 'world view' that does not permit anything else to filter into the perspective than a mere bias, but yes. However as I said, the presence of the Nordic countries in the index does not validate the index. We more or less agree, yes. However you still give some credibility to these indexes whereas I see them as mere extensions of the PR machine of their own establishment.