Time China, India created own anti-graft indices

CHINA'S anti-corruption net appears to be catching tigers as well as flies. Last December, a former mayor of Nanjing, a high-ranking party official, was indicted on corruption charges. In the same week, a Chinese court sentenced a prominent businesswoman for bribery related to lucrative kickbacks from contract work. She was linked to China's former railroads minister, himself convicted of bribery and abuse of power in 2013.

China's crackdown on corruption is well publicised. President Xi Jinping has declared a commitment to indiscriminately root out all forms of corruption, from high level officials to minor bureaucrats. Nevertheless, despite some high-profile convictions and headline-grabbing investigations, China is failing to convince some Western analysts that it is truly committed. Transparency International's 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index illustrates that the early stage of China's war on corruption is not registering well in certain metrics.

Through the late 1990s, China consistently improved its rank in the index. For the first decade of the 2000s, it held relatively stable and saw further improvement in the past several years. This upward trend, combined with the Chinese government's stated resolve to tackle corruption, makes the latest dip in its index score more confounding.