Taking the comparative standpoint

While Albania is devising new verbal strategies to cope with the report, other countries have taken the right comparative approach in analyzing the results. Across the world mass media have had different comments on the report results. Thus, one of the main newspapers in Greece, Kathimerini reports that Greeks are eight times more likely to pay a bribe than the average Western European according to the TI report. The newspaper emphasized that in Europe, only Albania and Romania had a higher percentage of people answering yes to “a bribe” than Greece. Kathimerini compares the 17 percent of Greece’s corruption to the average 2 percent of the same figure in Western Europe. The report indicates that among EU countries Greece and the Czech Republic have major problems when it comes to corrupt police forces. It also indicated that Greeks rank political parties to be the most corrupt organizations, followed by the mass media and the armed forces as the least corrupt. LA Times, concludes that corruption has a global foothold and that bribery is most common in Africa, where an average of 36% of those surveyed said had paid a bribe in the last 12 year. The article, though, does not fail to mention that Albania is to be considered the top offender. North America had the lowest incidence of bribery, with 2% of respondents saying they had paid a bribe. The global dimension of the phenomenon was also indicated by Robin Hodess, policy and research director at Transparency International who said “corruption has infiltrated public life and burrowed in.”