CorruptionRadar
Country profile - CRI

Corruption in Costa Rica

7 sub-national regions - 1995-2022. Latest country-level SCI: 65.8 (2022).

Grand: 47.2 Petty: - Latest observed: 2018

Costa Rica: key corruption facts

The most corrupt region of Costa Rica is Puntarenas (62.4/100), and the least corrupt is Cartago (67.6/100), on a 0-100 scale where 0 is most corrupt and 100 is least. All 7 regions are ranked below.

  • In 2022, Costa Rica's national Subnational Corruption Index (SCI) was 65.8/100, on a scale where 0 is the most corrupt and 100 the least corrupt.
  • Most corrupt region: Puntarenas (SCI 62.4/100, 2022).
  • Least corrupt region: Cartago (SCI 67.6/100, 2022).
  • Grand corruption (SGCI): 47.2/100; petty corruption (SPCI): /100 (last directly observed in 2018).
  • Trend: Costa Rica's SCI moved from 64.1/100 (1995) to 65.8/100 (2022).
  • Coverage: 7 regions, 1995–2022. Source: Subnational Corruption Database (Crombach & Smits, 2024, Nature Scientific Data), CC BY 4.0.

How Costa Rica 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 Costa Rica into 7 regions.

Index Latest Scale Based on
Subnational Corruption Index (SCI) 65.8 0–100 (100 = cleanest) Households — perception & experience
Transparency International CPI 54 0–100 (100 = cleanest) Experts & business surveys
World Bank Control of Corruption 0.5 ≈ −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 7 regions. Higher values mean cleaner governance (0 = most corrupt, 100 = least corrupt).

68 57 1995 2022

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

Regions (7)

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 Puntarenas CRIr106 1995-2022 62.4
2 San Jose CRIr101 1995-2022 64.4
3 Limon CRIr107 1995-2022 66.1
4 Guanacaste CRIr105 1995-2022 66.2
5 Alajuela CRIr102 1995-2022 66.9
6 Heredia CRIr104 1995-2022 67.4
7 Cartago CRIr103 1995-2022 67.6

Download Costa Rica

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 CRI.csv