KINGSTON, Jamaica — Jamaica has fallen four spots on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2024, but the country’s CPI score remains unchanged from year-earlier levels.

The international corruption watchdog ranks Jamaica #73 out of 180 countries, down from #69 in 2023, in the 2024 CPI which was officially released on Tuesday. The island’s CPI score of 44, the highest the country has ever attained, is the same as last year.

On the CPI, zero means ‘highly corrupt’ and 100 ‘very clean’.  Over the past 23 years, Jamaica has averaged a CPI score of 38, with its lowest score of 30 recorded in 2009. A CPI score below 50 indicates a serious corruption problem, and Jamaica has consistently remained in this category for more than two decades.

According to Transparency International, its CPI highlights “the stark contrast between nations with strong, independent institutions and free, fair elections, and those with repressive authoritarian regimes”.

It explained that, “Full democracies have a CPI average of 73, while flawed democracies average 47, and non-democratic regimes just 33.”

This therefore puts Jamaica in the category of a “flawed democracy”.

In the Caribbean, Jamaica continues to lag behind Barbados, the Bahamas, and St Vincent which ranked higher, with Barbados earning the distinction of being perceived to be the least corrupt among the nine English-speaking Caribbean nations for the fifth consecutive year. Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana are the only Caribbean countries with CPI scores consistently under 50.

At the global level, Denmark, Finland, Singapore, and New Zealand top the 2024 CPI rankings, while South Sudan, Somalia, Venezuela, and Syria rank among the nations perceived to be most corrupt.