Bulgaria has regressed in the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention  enforcement, a new report by Transparency International has shown.

“Fifteen years after the Convention entered into force, there are still 22 countries with Little or No Enforcement and eight countries with only Limited Enforcement. As a result, the Convention’s fundamental goal of creating a corruption-free level playing field for global trade is still far from being achieved,” Transparency International said in its Progress Report 2014 .

The OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, adopted in 1997, requires each signatory country to make foreign bribery a crime for which individuals and enterprises are responsible.

The performance of each country is assessed according to the number of new investigations it has launched and moved them forward to court proceedings.

In its tenth annual progress report on OECD Anti-Bribery Convention enforcement released last week Transparency International said there are ‘a few improvements’ that can be reported, but the performance of the majority of the countries that agree to combat foreign bribery in international business transactions is ‘far from satisfactory’.

Canada and New Zealand are the only countries to have improved since 2013, while Bulgaria and Denmark have both dropped from the ‘Limited Enforcement’ to the ‘Little or No Enforcement’ category.

The classification of other countries has not changed.

The OECD Anti-Bribery Convention is a key instrument for curbing the export of corruption globally because the 41 countries that had signed it account for about two-thirds of world exports and nearly 90% of total foreign direct investment outflows, the report said.

Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the US, which together are responsible for 23.1% of world exports, are ranked in the ‘Active Enforcement’ category.

A total of 22 countries, which between them represent 27% of world exports, are in the ‘Little or No Enforcement’ group. Besides Bulgaria and Denmark, other countries in that category include Japan South Korea, Russia, Ireland, Poland, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Greece, Slovenia  and Estonia.

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