For as long as there have been institutions and governance of any significant scale, corruption has existed. Nevertheless, while the existence of corruption is universal, the scale of corruption varies amongst societies and, notably, the perception of levels of corruption vary amongst different countries – i.e., some countries are perceived to have very little or virtually no corruption; whereas, in some other countries, corruption is assumed to be endemic. The non-governmental organization (NGO) Transparency International, yearly, publishes the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) an index of countries that are rated by how corrupt they are perceived to be. Investopedia describes the CPI as a scoring mechanism – a score of 0 indicating extremely high levels of corruption and a score of 100 indicating low levels.