Corrupt VS OOXML

Kai Puolamäki from Effi has published an interesting article Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format after there has been some incident that happened in some country that has an ability to vote for OOXML. Effi has studied the relation between the corruption level and voting behaviours of the countries and the conclusion is:

More corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal

They use the CPI Index (Corruption Perceptions Index) as a measure of corruption. CPI index is a number between 1 and 10. A small CPI index means that the country is perceived to be very corrupted, while a large CPI index means that the country is perceived to have little corruption.

Based on the data i got from the site, Indonesia is in 130 (out of 163 countries) with 2.2 - 2.6 of CPI, but we finally decided to abstain, after there was no major decision (half of the member is accepting and the other half is rejecting). I think that's a big win for Indonesia, even though we should be able to say No instead of abstain. Perhaps they should raise our CPI index

The interesting part is that Sweden, which has 9.0 - 9.3 of CPI (meaning lower corruption) has a scandal about this, when a Microsoft representative was caught offering to recompense partners for voting yes to OOXML.

One note about the statistics shown in the site :

It does not naturally tell anything about the reason of the relation between corruption level and voting behaviour of a country; in any case, whatever the reason for the correlation, also some quite uncorrupted countries voted for the approval. And although the trend is interesting and the results informative, the [above] conclusion is still not particularly strong due to a relatively small number of voting countries.