It's a corrupt oul' world

I'm just after finding this on the Guardian's website, and it's rather interesting as it reduces the whole world to a series of dots. The colour and the size of the dots relate to how corrupt the country in question is. I've always been fascinated by such alternative ways of displaying "the world". I find them very hand for challenging our prejudices.

What's really amazing about it is that it's as if North America and Western Europe vanish, and the shape that remains is fairly recognizable as the rest of the world. The entire African continent is basically unchanged; what does that say about its levels of corruption?

As a matter of interest, Ireland doesn't fare too badly at all, clocking it with 8 out of 10. (10 being good.) That's marginally better than Great Britain (7.6), slightly worse than Iceland (8.5) and bit still far short of class-topping New Zealand (9.3).

And the bad news... Well it's not looking good for Somalia (1.1), or Iraq (1.5), or Afghanistan (1.4) or the Sudan (1.6); so that would lead us to believe that where there is war, corruption follows close behind. In terms of countries that have more industrial clout, yet have brown envelopes and back handers a-plenty, we've Italy (3.9), China (3.5) , Russia (2.1) and Brazil (3.7). I'm not really sure what that tells us about those countries, but rather I suppose it confirms anecdotal evidence.

Still, as a cartographic exercise, it's very interesting.