Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) generated the usual chatter. Countries that performed well congratulated themselves; countries further down the list decried the results as unscientific and biased. Rankings are always interesting, but it is more useful to think about the bigger picture of how corruption and mismanagement really need to be viewed. Making sense of the perception as it relates to how governments should indeed interact with their citizens, or how they should put in place measures to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, merits much more attention. There are two main observations that should help put things in perspective about the CPI, an annual ranking of countries according to their scores on perceived levels of corruption on a scale from 100 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). While the index is effective in getting people talking about corruption, the scores themselves have lost their power... — blogs.adb.org/blog