Corruption is on the up.

That is the overall conclusion of a report published by the NGO Transparency International on Thursday, to coincide with the UN's International Anti-Corruption Day. It is a huge study. Some 91,500 people were questioned in 86 countries and territories on their experience of paying bribes and their opinions on the prevalence of corruption in a number of institutions.

Regionally, the Middle East and North Africa fared rather badly. They came second, after Sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of the number of people reporting having paid bribes over the last year: 36 percent of respondents said they had resorted to paying bribes in order to get things done or to avoid problems. In Sub-Saharan Africa, such is the insidiousness of bribery that more than one in two reported paying bribes.

That bribery is widespread in the Middle East will not come as a huge surprise to anyone who has lived in the region. It is, however, useful to be able to put a figure on something that happens under the table and to be able to situate the region internationally. Unfortunately given that only five countries in the Middle East and Africa were surveyed - Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine - the results cannot really be taken to adequately represent the region.

But as it happens, Transparency International also publishes a global corruption perceptions index. This index, as the name indicates, is not a survey but an index measure of corruption per country ranging from 0 for very corrupt to 9 for no corruption. It is compiled using data collected by businesses, banks and agencies working in each country.

If red is for corrupt, yellow for not corrupt and orange for something in between, then the 2010 index published last October places most countries of the GCC in the orange zone, ranging from 4.5 for Kuwait to an astounding 7.7 for Qatar. Several neighboring Arab countries are, however, firmly entrenched in the red zone: Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon all score less than 3 on the scale, and similarly in Africa, Algeria, Libya and Sudan also score less than 3, with Egypt and Morocco faring slightly better with scores of 3.1 and 3.4, while Tunisia and Jordan fall within the same ball park as the GCC countries. Iraq and Sudan even manage to fall into the bottom seven. It's not exactly glorious.

But who are the stars? Who are the countries that achieve best practice in terms of eradicating corruption? The top five in this table of honour are Denmark, New Zealand, Singapore, Finland and Sweden, each scoring 9.2 or 9.3 on the scale. And if we look again at the latest survey, the only country where people reported no bribery at all in the last year was Denmark. Quite an achievement.

Looking at that list I am struck by how these are countries with high GDP per capita (all of them are in the top 20, with the exception of New Zealand which is ranked 24 by the World Bank), with very high standards in education (Finland, Singapore and New Zealand were ranked 2, 4 and 6 respectively in the latest OECD education rankings) and with a high quality of living (all of them have capital cities that score more than 100 in the latest Mercer Quality of Living survey). Are these the magic ingredients that lead to greater transparency? Or does greater transparency translate into higher standards of living? It would certainly seem that the more a country develops economically, politically and socially, the less room there is for corruption.

David Fuller's view Governance Is Everything, as we frequently say at Fullermoney. Corruption can only impede the wheels of commerce. From an investment perspective, the least corrupt countries will generally have the lowest risk. However, in terms of stock market potential, countries which appear to be experiencing a fundamental improvement in governance are likely to be among the best performers during global bull market cycles.