HONG KONG, Oct 20 (AFP) - Asian nations again fared badly in an influential annual ranking of corrupt countries released Wednesday, with Bangladesh rated the most corrupt in the world for the fourth consecutive year.
New Zealand was considered the region's least corrupt by graft watchdog Transparency International (TI), placing second behind Finland, which was named least corrupt.
Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan also ranked highly, gaining scores of around seven on a scale where 10 means a country is "highly clean" and zero equates to "highly corrupt". Finland achieved a near-perfect 9.7 and New Zealand 9.6.
In all, 106 of the 146 ranked countries scored less than five, while 60 scored less than three, the London-based organisation said.
"Across the world, corruption in large-scale public projects is a daunting obstacle to sustainable development, tearing at the social fabric and contributing to civil unrest and conflict," TI chairman Peter Eigen said in a statement.
"It is a blow to the hopes of millions, one that results in a major loss of public funds needed for education, healthcare and poverty alleviation, both in developed and developing countries."
The report is a distillation of 18 surveys of the perceptions of mainly expatriate businessmen.
Among the countries scoring less than three were, in descending order, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Indonesia, Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Bangladesh scored just 1.5, an improvement on its 1.3 last year, but still so low that it ranked bottom again along with lawless Haiti, thrown into chaos earlier this year by the resignation of its president.
The lower three were considered more corrupt than even Iraq, which scored 2.1, equal with Pakistan.
China was among countries that recorded the biggest falls, slipping from 66th place with a score of 3.4 to 71st on 3.1, equal to Syria. India remained static with a score of 2.8.
Political analyst Robert Broadfoot, of the US think tank Political and Economic Risk Consultancy which compiles its own corruption index, said such reports had often far-reaching effects on censured governments.
"These are taken very seriously indeed -- I have been yelled at by prime ministers over some of the rankings we've given countries," Broadfoot said.
He warned, however, that rankings were heavily dependent upon political sentiments at the time of surveying.
"Perceptions of corruption change over time according to the feelings of the expatriate businessmen who are surveyed," he said.
"Corruption is basically a misappropriation of resources and when economies are doing well, those sorts of things go unnoticed because everybody is doing well.
"But when they turn sour and businesses start to suffer, businessmen begin looking for causes. That's when the misappropriated resources are noticed."
Malaysia's changed rankings this year illustrated that tendency, he said. It scored poorly, ranking joint 39th with a score of five by IT from a score of 5.2 last year.
"It suggests that the abdication of Mahathir ushered a freeing-up of freedom of speech, allowing people to express their real feelings," he said. "That means Malaysia's rankings had been artificially high before."
Broadfoot warned that such indexes tended to suppress the real picture in even some countries considered clean because different cultures had different definition of what constituted corrupt activities.
"In the West corruption is considered stuff that is illegal, things you could be jailed for," he explained.
"That would include the activities of organised crime. But in Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan where organised crime is entrenched in society via triads and the yakuza, it isn't considered corrupt."