Dhaka, March 29 -- "In an increasingly performance-oriented society, metrics matter. What we measure affects what we do," argued the 2008 report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance. "If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things."

The Commission was challenging the primacy of GDP as the metric of development. But the same observation applies to corruption, which is conventionally - and misleadingly - measured as a one-dimensional problem.

Global corruption indices, including Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the World Bank's Control of Corruption Index, assign a single score to countries. These metrics consistently show that rich countries are "very clean" wh...