Andrew Green, Staff Reporter
JAMAICA is one of the most corrupt countries in the Caribbean, according to a United Nations Development (UNDP) Report.
The UNDP's Human Development Report 2002 includes corruption as one of a number of measures of development used to assess countries.
The corruption indicator was developed by the World Bank and is based on surveys of a number of respondents, including non-governmental organisations, risk-rating agencies and think tanks.
"The central message of this report is that effective governance is central to human development," said Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP administrator, in the publication released on Wednesday.
"This means that institutions and power are structured and distributed in a way that gives real voice and space to poor people and creates mechanisms through which the powerful - whether political leaders, corporations, or influential actors - can be held accountable for their actions."
Jamaica is given a corruption rating of -0.06 in the UNDP report. The index ranges from 2.5 to -2.5, with -2.5 being the highest possible level of securing illicit gains in politics or business. This puts Jamaica ahead of Guyana with a rating of -0.45. It is even further ahead of Haiti, with a rating of -.0.84, which puts it at the bottom of the Caribbean regional states.
But Jamaica lags well behind the Bahamas, which has a rating of 0.74. Trinidad and Tobago has a rating of 0.49 and Belize is rated 0.48.
Costa Rica topped the ranking of regional states with a score of 0.87. Cuba had a -0.12 score while the Dominican Republic scored -0.20.
However, Jamaicans have always regarded the country as corrupt.
A poll commissioned by The Gleaner in September last year, indicated that the great majority of Jamaicans feel that corruption was more rampant than it was five years earlier. And in 1998 a Transparency International report rated Jamaica at a lowly 3.8 on a scale of one to 10. Jamaica was ranked at 39 among 80 nations.
The Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC), the Caribbean news service, noted that "at least one Jamaican official" was concerned about Jamaica's low ranking in areas also including development and gender empowerment.
The Observer newspaper in Barbados quoted Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Benjamin Clare, as saying: "I don't see how Jamaica could be so far behind those countries. In Saudia Arabia women are not even allowed to drive a car and their prospect for education is very limited. And some of their laws are very harsh and ancient - such as beheadings."
