Country profile - BEL

Corruption in Belgium

11 sub-national regions - 1995-2022. Latest country-level SCI: 81 (2022).

Grand: 72.8 Petty: 83.5 Latest observed: 2022

Belgium: key corruption facts

The most corrupt region of Belgium is Prov. Hainaut (71.2/100), and the least corrupt is Prov. Brabant Wallon (84.5/100), on a 0-100 scale where 0 is most corrupt and 100 is least. All 11 regions are ranked below.

  • In 2022, Belgium's national Subnational Corruption Index (SCI) was 81/100, on a scale where 0 is the most corrupt and 100 the least corrupt.
  • Most corrupt region: Prov. Hainaut (SCI 71.2/100, 2022).
  • Least corrupt region: Prov. Brabant Wallon (SCI 84.5/100, 2022).
  • Grand corruption (SGCI): 72.8/100; petty corruption (SPCI): 83.5/100 (last directly observed in 2022).
  • Trend: Belgium's SCI moved from 74.3/100 (1995) to 81/100 (2022).
  • Coverage: 11 regions, 1995–2022. Source: Subnational Corruption Database (Crombach & Smits, 2024, Nature Scientific Data), CC BY 4.0.

How Belgium compares: SCD vs. the CPI and World Bank

The Subnational Corruption Index is scored 0–100 on the same orientation as Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (higher = cleaner). The difference: the CPI and the World Bank measure the perceptions of experts and business executives and report one national number, while the SCI is built from what ordinary households perceive and experience — and it breaks Belgium into 11 regions.

Index Latest Scale Based on
Subnational Corruption Index (SCI) 81 0–100 (100 = cleanest) Households — perception & experience
Transparency International CPI 73 0–100 (100 = cleanest) Experts & business surveys
World Bank Control of Corruption 1.5 ≈ −2.5 to 2.5 Aggregated expert sources

Most recent year — SCI 2022, CPI 2022, CCI 2022. The SCD also publishes region-anchored SUB-CPI and SUB-CCI series so the CPI and World Bank measures can be read at the regional level.

SCI trajectory - 1995-2022

Country-level mean of the Subnational Corruption Index, averaged across all 11 regions. Higher values mean cleaner governance (0 = most corrupt, 100 = least corrupt).

82 70 1995 2022

Source: SCD v1.0 (Comprehensive Dataset). Years where the panel was filled by inter/extrapolation are included in the country mean.

Regions (11)

Each row is a sub-national region with its latest SCI score. Click into any row for the region's full time series.

# Region GDL code Years Latest SCI
1 Prov. Hainaut BELr108 1995-2022 71.2
2 Prov. Namur BELr111 1995-2022 78.2
3 Prov. Liege BELr109 1995-2022 79.3
4 Bruxelles - Brussel BELr101 1995-2022 79.7
5 Prov. Luxembourg BELr110 1995-2022 81.2
6 Prov. Antwerpen BELr102 1995-2022 82
7 Prov. West-Vlaanderen BELr106 1995-2022 82.5
8 Prov. Vlaams-Brabant BELr105 1995-2022 82.6
9 Limburg BELr103 1995-2022 83.6
10 Prov. Brabant Wallon BELr107 1995-2022 84.5
11 Prov. Oost-Vlaanderen BELr104 1995-2022 84.5

Download Belgium

Per-country panel slice in CSV format. Columns: iso, country, gdl, region, year, sci. Direct dataset citations should reference the Figshare deposit (see How to cite).

Download BEL.csv