NOVEMBER 10, 2006

The places we go

Formula 1 travels all over the world, and does business in a wide variety of different countries. Some are better than others but what is clear is that most of them seem to do business without too much sleaze being involved. The organisation Transparency International does an annual review of global corruption and publishes a ranking of the good places to do business and places that are best avoided. This is called the Corruption Perceptions Index and is compiled by talking to people who do business in each country.

The best places, according to the latest index are Finland, Iceland and New Zealand, while Haiti is be avoided as it ranks 163rd out of 163 countries. Of the rest F1 seems to be doing all right with eight of its races in the top 25 countries. The best place to do business, apparently, is Australia (which ranks 9th in the world), followed by Britain (11th), Canada (14th), Germany (16th), Japan (17th), France (18th), the United States (20th) and Spain (23rd).

There is then something of a gap back to Bahrain (36th), Hungary (41st), Malaysia (44th), Italy (45th), Turkey (60th) with Brazil and China sharing the bottom position for F1 in equal 70th. Monaco, for some reason, is not listed in the survey.