Bangladesh has slipped two places down to 149th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index after registering its lowest ever rating score in 2023.

The South Asian nation's score fell from 25 in 2022 to 24 in 2023, which means the public sector is perceived to be more corrupt than it was a year ago.

Transparency International Bangladesh's Executive Director Iftekharuzzaman elaborated on the findings and discussed the current state of corruption in the country at a media briefing on Tuesday.

Among South Asian nations, only Afghanistan fared worse with a rating of 20, while Pakistan scored 29, Nepal scored 35, Sri Lanka scored 34, and India 39, according to the index released by the Berlin-based organisation.

The CPI index is the most widely used global corruption ranking in the world and measures the perception of how corrupt each country’s public sector is according to experts and businesspeople.

It relies on 13 independent data sources and uses a scale of zero to 100, where zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.

Since 2012, Bangladesh’s CPI score has hovered in the mid to high 20s, achieving its best score of 28 in 2017. Its previous lowest score on the index was 25, which it achieved in 2014, 2015, and 2022.

While countries have improved their scores throughout the world, 2023 was another year of "little to no meaningful progress" for the Asia Pacific region, where the average CPI score remained stagnant at 45, according to the organisation.

Denmark ranked as the least corrupt country on the index, with a score of 90, followed by Finland, New Zealand, Norway and Singapore.