Azerbaijan, Baku, 23 September / Trend / The corruption perception indexin Azerbaijan reduced to 1.9 in 2008 from 2.1 in 2007, mentioned in the press release provided by Transparency Azerbaijan on 23 September.
The country demonstrated a steady increase of its ranking from 1.8 in 2003 to its peak of 2.4 in 2006, because of the number of the anticorruption measures adopted by the Government and the efforts undertaken by the civil society.
Specifically, the Government is implementing the National Strategy for Increasing Transparency and
Combating Corruption for 2007-2010, adopted with the considerable inputs from the civil society and
international organizations, which makes it significantly more effective than the first National Anticorruption Program for 2004-2006.
However, TI's global CPI is a composite index that consists of eight different sources for Azerbaijan, five of which use the data covering a period of two years. Such a mix of sources did not permit for many of these positive reforms and accomplishments to be properly reflected and the present change of the public
perception and understanding of the progressive reforms will only show over time, the press release says.
TI Azerbaijan also remains fully convinced that the results of these efforts will soon reflect in the latest surveys, such as it did in the Doing Business 2009, and consequently improve the Azerbaijani ranking in the CPI too.
[According to the report Doing Business prepared by WB and IFC, Azerbaijan headed list as the best reformer country in 2007-2008 in the world, demonstrating improvement on 7 of 10 indices of the regulative reform]
Azerbaijan is the only country within Transparency International movement with representation in over 90 countries all over the world to manage 5 Advocacy and Legal Advice Centers all over the country, which render legal advice to citizens - victims of corruption. Since the project's launch in July 2005 TI Azerbaijan had about 15,000 calls/contacts and over 2,000 formal written complaints submitted by citizens with various problems, of which about 80% have been resolved by various public agencies in cooperation with TI-Az.
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