[vidarh]

> The US is less corrupt than France for example

Careful there. The Transparency International page you link to is the perception index.

It measures what a set of people perceives corruption to be like in each country, and composits results from a number of different surveys in a way that as far as I know is not benchmarked against other data to verify if survey results actually matches reality.

You can not use it as a measure of how corrupt a country actually is. It's likely that it's an indicator when the numbers are very far apart, or that it can be used to spot trends in a country over time, but the relatively small difference between France and the US seems unlikely to be sufficient to draw any conclusions.

[baku-fr]

Furthermore, we French people are much more pessimistic than people in the US. Thinking that the politicians are just one corrupted kind is almost a national sport.

[skolor]

After looking through their data a little, I'm curious: who is paying all these bribes[1]?

7% of people who interacted with the police report paying a bribe to them? 11% for education I could believe, but 15% to the judiciary, 17% to "land services"?

Maybe I just need to step my bribe game up, but that seems significantly higher than I would have expected.

[1] http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013/country/?country=united_...