European Commissioner: Extent of Corruption Across the EU is ‘Breathtaking’

According to
a report from the European Commission, corruption costs the
European Union at least 120 billion euros (about $162 billion) a
year.

European Union Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem, who
presented the report, wrote about corruption in the Swedish
newspaper
Göteborgs-Posten, saying that, “The extent of the
problem is breathtaking.”

The report mentions the finding of Eurobarometer surveys, which
show that in Scandinavian European Union member states and
Luxembourg residents believe that corruption is widespread in their
country at rates less than the E.U. average (74 percent) and very
few expect to pay bribes.

In some E.U. member states, such as Germany, France, and the
Netherlands, more than half of residents claim that corruption is
widespread, despite the fact that very few residents say they
expect to pay bribes.

There are of course some countries in the E.U. where many
residents do expect to pay bribes and do think that corruption is
widespread:

As for countries lagging behind in the scores concerning both
perceptions and actual experience of corruption, these include
Croatia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania and
Greece. In these countries, between 6 % and 29 % of respondents
indicated that they were asked or expected to pay a bribe in
the past 12 months, while 84 % up to 99 % think that
corruption is widespread in their country. Croatia and the Czech
Republic appear to make a somewhat more positive impression
with slightly better scores than the rest of the
countries from the same group. 

Map based on some of the Eurobarometer findings below:

Transparency
International ranks countries for corruption. According to last
year’s rankings, the U.S. is more corrupt that Denmark, Sweden, the
U.K., and Germany, but is less corrupt than Ireland, Greece, Italy,
Spain, and France.

Sixty percent of the
American respondents to the Transparency International survey
believe that corruption has increased over the past two years by
either “a lot” or “a little.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, political
parties are viewed as the most corruption institutions in the U.S.,
with 76 percent of respondents saying that political parties are
either “corrupt” or “extremely corrupt.”