Corruption ranking

The Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy ranked Taiwan lower (more corrupt) than China in a recent corruption report. President Ma Ying-jeou is spinning this as a DPP era problem, and calling for action to clean up "major" scandals.

But since the ranking results are based on a survey of foreign business executives, most of the corruption being talked about would be low level corruption that the business executives deal with when opening a company, dealing with regulations, taxes or officials, etc.

Ma is proposing the wrong remedy for the malady-- a set of laws that are designed to facilitate corruption (political donation laws that ask politicians to report spending but not receipts, a lack of transparency in politicians income, a legislature which won't take back salary of unqualified legislators who stole their salaries, etc). These laws work hand-in-hand with a low level political culture which expects corruption.

If Taiwan wants to improve its ranking on the corruption index, it will have to do much more than have a set of "investigations" of "major" corruption scandals.