Costa Rica stands out in its fight against corruption

For the last couple of months I have written about the country’s effort to contain the Corona Virus. As of Friday June 26 there have been a little over 2,000 cases with about half having recovered and only 12 deaths. B utwe are not out of the woods yet.

Tourism and other sectors of the economy have been hard hit as in most countries in the world. Fortunately, as the saying goes “The bigger they are the harder they fall,” this should enable Costa Rica to weather the storm a lot better than larger countries with huge economies.

On another front, much has been made about corruption in Latin America. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index and the Index to Combat Corruption in 2020, Costa Rica is ranked third out of 15 countries on a the list of least corrupt countries. Only Uruguay and Chile have less corruption. Costa Rica is considerably less corrupt than Panamá, Ecuador, Mexico and other so-called Latin American retirement and relocation havens.

In fact, Costa Rica is considered the 40th least corrupt country in the world. This is a very favorable ranking since there is currently a worldwide corruption crisis.

All of the country’s methods for combating crime were meticulously analyzed to come up with the respective rankings. Factors such as the independence of judicial systems, the influence of investigative reporting and the amount of resources allocated to combat “white collar crime were taken into account.

As in most countries there is small scale corruption here like bribery . No country is immune to some types of corruption even the good old US.