11 March 2017 06:45 pm
They survey results showed Sri Lanka has a bribery rate of 15 percent among 17 countries and its citizens frequently pay bribes to Police. It also said people pay bribes to public schools, courts and utility providers.
The report titled “People and Corruption: Asia Pacific”, which was launched on Tuesday, has surveyed nearly 22,000 people in these countries about their experience with corruption and paying bribe during the last 12 months.
The countries included India, Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, China, Myanmar, South Korea, Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Governments in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Japan, Mongolia, and Malaysia were perceived to be doing badly at fighting corruption by six in 10 of their citizens.
However, around a half or more of people living in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand had said that their government was doing a good job.
According to the results from the survey, Australia followed by Sri Lanka and Taiwan have done the best with the most positive ratings overall across the key corruption questions in the survey.
“In these countries, few people felt that corruption was increasing, many people felt empowered to help fight against corruption and bribery rates were very or fairly low. However, even in these well performing countries, there were still areas for improvement such as poor ratings of government efforts to fight corruption (Australia and Taiwan) or a substantial minority of people who thought that the police were highly corrupt (Sri Lanka),” the survey said.