Despite having climbed one spot from 113th to 112th, with a score of 2.9 Moldova is still perceived as a highly corrupt country, according to the annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2008, which includes 180 countries, Info-Prim Neo reports. On a scale from zero (highly corrupt) to ten (highly clean), Denmark leads the rankings, scoring 9.3. Neighboring Romania scored 3.8, while Ukraine a mere 2.5. Transparency International Moldova's director Lilia Carasciuc has told today a news conference that Moldova's performance of climbing one spot is rather modest, bearing in mind the considerable financial efforts of the international organization to curb corruption. In monetary terms, their efforts amounted to $24 million from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, €3.5 million from the Council of Europe, about 400,000 from the UNDP, and so on. According to Carasciuc, the reason why the results are so modest is that there is a low capacity of absorbing rapidly and efficiently the funds in order to effect change, and also because many anticorruption measures do not have a direct impact. Other reasons that led to such a poor result include the inadequate information of the public functionaries, the lack of functional mechanisms for enforcing laws and the poor organization of the anticorruption bodies. Among CIS states, Moldova ranked third, after Georgia and Armenia with 3.9 and 2.9, respectively. The Transparency International CPI measures the perceived levels of public-sector corruption in a given country and is a composite index, drawing on different expert and business surveys. Similarly, statistically significant improvements over the last year can be identified in Albania, Cyprus, Georgia, South Korea, Turkey, etc.