It baffles me that people don't realize just how bad it is in non democratic countries. Russia has FSB extorting shop owners for protection money, and even an occasional assassination is nothing particularly interesting there. Chinese companies have party cells in management. Venezuela or many African countries need to hire foreign contractors (sometimes Western :) ) so that their heads of state and other VIPs do not get killed by their coworkers. The Red Sea has actual pirates. Lebanon failed to remove kilotons of explosive ammonia nitrate for years, until it eventually blew up the capital. I could go on and on, but you can see how this compares to "train company bricked a train and it's a major scandal".

perception != reality

There are reasons for why we can assume that the west is the least corrupt area of the whole world.

But for the average person, perception does influence how likely they are themselves to take part in corruption, and that in turn does influence the total amount of corruption in a country. Actual corruption is very hard to measure, so perception of corruption is a reasonable thing to research since it is in many ways "the best you can do" to get some measure of actual corruption.

Perception is a proxy for reality, given that you can’t measure the latter.

Note from that wikipedia article

>The Index only measures public sector corruption, ignoring the private sector. This, for instance, means the well-publicized Libor scandal, Odebrecht case and the VW emissions scandal are not counted as corrupt actions.

Because corruption is when state power is abused. When private companies do illegal shit it’s just a crime.

There is no requirement for it to be "state" power, please look up the definition.

Okay, whatever. Pretty sure they private sector corruption isn’t worse in the west than in other parts of the world but if you want to disagree I won’t be able to change your mind