Jamaica has fallen four places in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) rankings, remaining among the worst countries within the English-speaking Caribbean.

In the 2024 ranking, released at midnight Tuesday (February 11), Jamaica placed 73rd out of 180 countries, compared to 69th in 2023.

Posting a corruption score of 44 out of 100 (where 0 means ‘highly corrupt’, and 100 ‘very clean’), Jamaica’s ranking has remained largely unchanged for 2024.

According to Transparency International, 44 stands as its country’s best score ever, which it previously attained in 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, and now in 2024.

In the 23 years that TI has been ranking Jamaica, the country has averaged a CPI score of only 38 out of 100. Prior to attaining its 44/100 CPI score for the first time in 2017, Jamaica had never scored higher than 41 (its CPI score in 2015). Jamaica’s lowest CPI score ever was 30, recorded in 2009.

Instructively, Jamaica’s CPI jump in TI’s 2017 rankings came in the same year that Parliament passed a long-awaited anti-corruption law – the Integrity Commission Act. The act merged the country’s then 3 leading anti-corruption commissions into a single entity – the Integrity Commission.

Transparency International advised that a CPI score of below 50 means that a country has a serious corruption problem.

“Jamaica has been firmly planted in this category for 23 years. A poor CPI signals prevalent bribery, lack of punishment for corruption and public institutions that do not respond to citizens’ needs,” the report noted.

Categorising Jamaica as a “flawed democracy”, Transparency International added that its CPI “highlights the stark contrast between nations with strong, independent institutions and free, fair elections, and those with repressive authoritarian regimes.”

Barbados remains the least corrupt country within the English-speaking Caribbean for the fifth consecutive year, The Bahamas and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana maintain their placements at the bottom – the same order as they were in 2023, 2022 and 2021. Instructively, the country rankings for all nine were improved in 2024, except for Jamaica, T&T and Guyana, which logged declines.

Regional rankings are as follows:

Denmark topped Transparency International’s 2024 CPI country rankings, followed closely by Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands and Australia rounding out the top 10.

At the other end of the scale was South Sudan, which garnered the distinction of being the world’s most corrupt country, trailed by Somalia, Venezuela, Syria and Yemen as the worst five.

Transparency International chairman François Valérian said that the dangerous trends revealed in this year’s CPI highlight the need for countries to urgently follow through with concrete action to address global corruption.

“Corruption is an evolving global threat that does far more than undermine development. It is a key cause of declining democracy, instability and human rights violations,” he said.

“The international community and every nation must make tackling corruption a top and long-term priority. This is crucial to pushing back against authoritarianism and securing a peaceful, free and sustainable world,” he urged.

Turning to the Americas, which recorded a 2024 CPI average of 42/100, TI has said that the region must take urgent action to control corruption.

“The absence of effective measures promotes human rights violations, and increases the influence of economic and political elites and organised crime in public affairs. This environment fosters impunity,” it has warned.

Since its inception in 1995, the CPI, TI’s flagship research product, has become the leading global indicator of public sector corruption. The index offers an annual snapshot of the relative degree of corruption by ranking countries and territories from all over the globe.