The release of the latest report of Transparency International on the perception of corruption in the world is pretty telling for our community: Macao is not doing well and we clearly need more surveys and elements of comparison if we are to clearly identify the issues, possibly solve them and ultimately dissipate crucial misunderstandings.
The issue here is not only that Macao is no. 43 out of 180 countries, and way behind Hong Kong (no. 22). First of all, even if Macao’s ranking is the same as last year, it has severely degraded in the past few years: Macao’s rank in 2006, the first year it appeared in the Corruption Perceptions Index, was 26 and then went down to 34 in 2007. For Hong Kong, the fall seems to be far more recent, as it was no. 12 last year and had never gone below the 18th slot since it first appeared in the index back in 1995. Then, this index is normally based on 13 independent surveys, of which only three include or are available for Macao. This has a crucial consequence as it affects the reliability of the index score: in the case of Macao, confidence runs only between 39% and 69%, the lowest of the first 54 rankings in the whole study!
In the second Quarter of 2009 Macau Quality of Life report compiled by IIUM for Macau Business, we found that 49% of our respondents believed that corruption was widespread (“most officials” or “almost everyone” are/is corrupt), and among the 18-25 and 46-55 age cohorts this perception crossed the line of the absolute majority. When Macao was compared with other East Asian countries participating in the Asian Barometer (from which our question was derived), it was actually faring “pretty well”, being more on par with an established democracy like Japan or a more recent one like Korea than with the Philippines or Taiwan. However, it was—again!—lagging behind Hong Kong, where 73.8% of the people believe that “hardly anyone” or “not many officials” are corrupt, against 51% in Macao.
In the third Quarter of 2009 installation of this very same report, the investigators found that out of 15 items about which respondents were asked how Macao had fared during the past 10 years, the item regarding the level of corruption in the territory came last in terms of “improvement”, and was indeed the only one for which there were more people who felt that the situation had actually worsened. Wasn’t the culminating time when people thought of Macao as an unruly place supposed to be the years 1997 to 1999?
The belief that the best way to weather the storm is, on the one hand, to let the judicial institutions do their job and, on the other hand, ignore the so-called “tip-of-the-iceberg” rumors—if these are indeed only rumors—is far from satisfactory: the anti-smears website set up by the Obama team during the 2008 presidential election in the United States did cleanse Obama’s image and restore confidence in the whole electoral process. Obviously, requirements for transparency and accountability are different when one is elected and not simply selected.
©MDTimes/ Macau Inter-University Institute [25/11/2009]
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