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Estonia ranks 23rd worldwide, three places higher than last year.

Estonia is tied in place 23 with France, Chile and United Arab Emirate in the table ranking 168 countries of the world. Its point score, 70, is one point higher than last year when it placed 26th. In 2013 Estonia placed 28th with a point score of 68.

Of Estonia's Baltic neighbors, Lithuania is in place 32 with 61 points and Latvia in place 40 with 55 points.

Source: transparency.org

According to Transparency International Estonia the result for Estonia has improved a bit but the change is too small to indicate that the situation has improved. "Estonia is standing still and unfortunately there are no signs of moving toward Northern Europe which is less stained from corruption," said Erkka Jaakkola, head of the board of Transparency International Estonia.

According to Jaakkola the numerous corruption cases from the past year show that we have more corruption than the Estonian public has so far thought. "Conclusions have been made from these cases and steps show what next year's results for Estonia will be," Jaakkola said.

Among the 31 West European countries and EU member states covered by the survey Estonia shares the 14th place with France. The average score of these countries is 67 or three points lower than Estonia's score.

According to Transparency International Estonia, the efficiency of Estonian investigative institutions has improved and that enables to detect more corruption cases.

The score runs from zero, which is highly corrupt, to 100, which is very clean. The score for Latvia is 55 – the same as in 2014. However, due to changes in other countries, Latvia has gone up three places in the report, from 43 to 40, sharing it with Cape Verde, Costa Rica and Seychelles.

Russia is in 119th place, Belarus is 107th, while Ukraine is still seen as the most corrupt country in Europe and ranked in 130th place.

Lithuania climbed seven places on the Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index of 2015.

In the 2015 index, Lithuania scored 61 points on a 100-point scale (58 points in 2014), ranking 32nd among 168 rated countries, as compared to 39th out of 174 last year. Lithuania ranks 18th among nations of the European Union (EU) and Western Europe, up from 20th the year before.

"We see that, in businessmen's opinion, the corruption level in Lithuania is going down and corruption is not impeding business as much as it used to. However, experts note that politicians and public servants should better report to the society, and some of the laws do not work. Consequently, the key homework is clear. We should make the lobbyism operations more transparent and once and for all make major improvement to the quality of the services offered by the public sector," says Sergejus Muravjovas, the head of the Lithuanian office of Transparency International.

In the world, in general the state of corruption is not great as 68% of countries worldwide have a serious corruption problem. Half of the G20 countries are among them, results of the study show.

The Corruption Perceptions Index is based on expert opinions of public sector corruption. Countries' scores can be helped by open government where the public can hold leaders to account, while a poor score is a sign of prevalent bribery, lack of punishment for corruption and public institutions that don't respond to citizens' need.