Donald Trump made clear that his personal grudge with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky hasn’t abated during a phone interview with NBC News.
Speaking with Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker on Saturday, the president knocked Zelensky for offering assistance to the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, the latter of which the Ukrainian president said on Friday were seeking his aid in sharing drone detection technology.
The “last person we need help from is Zelensky,” Trump told Welker.
Consider the subjectivity of a “perceptions” index. And also, based on my own direct experience of corruption while doing business in a few countries, Transparency International’s rankings bore no relationship to what I was seeing. Societies whose elites are skilled at concealing corruption tend to have lower perception rankings than those where the elites are more flagrant, even when the actual corruption is the same in both cases. Not to mention that those doing the reporting are people doing business in those countries, and such people rapidly adapt to the local conditions.
I understand that hard data isn’t easy to come by, but using a perceptions index as a proxy is methodologically very questionable.
The sources and surveys which make up the CPI are based on carefully designed and calibrated questionnaires, answered by experts and business people.
As long as these questions are consistent then it seems fine as a data source.
It’s easy to criticise but hard to improve. If you’d like to augment this with another data source then I’d be interested.