MANILA
PRESIDENT Gloria Arroyo rejected Wednesday the result of an economic survey showing the Philippines as the most corrupt economy in Asia, saying the findings were based on “old data” and biased media reports.
Arroyo said the results of the survey by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd. (PERC), which was conducted in the first two months of this year, do not tally with the upbeat credit ratings given to the Philippines by foreign credit-rating agencies.
“The credit ratings are fine,” Arroyo said.
“As for political analysis, they work on old data, they don’t work on up-to-date data. And then they look at newspapers. And if you’re going to look at who are the ones in Transparency International Philippines, they are made up of opposition people,” she added.
Transparency International, also based in Hong Kong, has consistently given the Philippines low marks in fighting corruption.
The release of the PERC survey Tuesday came as a shocker for the Philippines since this was the first time that the country found itself ranked even lower than Indonesia or Thailand in terms of economic integrity.
Thailand and Indonesia ranked second in the survey of 1,476 expatriates in the region.
“The Philippines has the distinction of being perceived in the worst light this year,” said PERC, a Hong Kong-based group that provides advice to private firms and governments.
“It is bad and has been bad all along. People are just growing tired of the inaction and insincerity of leading officials when they promise to fight corruption,” the PERC report said.
The Philippines got a score of 9.40 from 7.80 last year in the poll, which has a grading system of zero as the best possible score and 10 as the worst. Thailand, which has a junta-backed government after last September’s coup, is probably the country where corruption problems are most visible, PERC said.
However, PERC said it had not noted a worsening in the actual situation in the Philippines despite its deteriorating score.
The protracted corruption trial of deposed President Joseph Estrada “is an example of the problem and probably explains why respondents to our survey were so negative in their assessment” of the country, the report said.
Indonesia, deemed Asia’s most corrupt country in the past five years, improved its score to 8.03, the same as Thailand. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s campaign against corruption has yielded positive results, though it’s being undermined by local-level officials, government bureaucrats and senior politicians, the report said.
Vietnam is the fourth most corrupt as the government is seen to take a selective approach to fighting corruption, the survey said. It scored 7.54 from last year’s 7.91. Vietnam was ranked the most corrupt economy in 2001.
Singapore is seen as the least corrupt of 13 economies, followed by Hong Kong and Japan, the PERC survey said.
Constancia de Guzman, chairman of the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC), said the PERC itself noted that the survey results did not reflect a worsening of the actual situation in the Philippines.
“If we are to talk about the government programs on anti-corruption, we have done, and are doing, a lot. This is observed by our stakeholders,” she said.
She cited a recent statement made by the American Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Amcham) expressing confidence in the Arroyo administration’s governance.
De Guzman said the PERC report only showed that the measures being adopted by government to address the corruption problem are not enough.
But she said there has been no let-up in government’s campaign against corruption. She said success in the anti-corruption drive have not made it to the headlines or have not been properly communicated to the public.
She said the PERC report focused on Estrada’s protracted trial and not on what the government has already done.
She, however, said people want actual results in the form of dismissals and suspensions.
“Even if we have improvement in the preventive measures and in the education component and strategic partnership, what the people want to know is how many people have been punished and put in jail due to corruption,” she said.
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