The majority of the 41 signatory countries to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) Anti-Bribery Convention, adopted in 1997, have failed to clamp down on foreign bribery activities.

Fifteen years after its implementation, only four countries have actively enforced the rules designed to keep global trade fair and stop the spread of corruption worldwide, anticorruption group Transparency International’s 2014 progress report on the enforcement of the convention has found.

The Anti-Bribery Convention was a “key instrument” for curbing the export of corruption globally as the signatory countries accounted for about two-thirds of world exports and almost 90% of total foreign direct investment outflows.

Transparency International said on Thursday that only the US, the UK, Germany and Switzerland – collectively accounting for 23.1% of world exports – were actively investigating and prosecuting companies that “cheat taxpayers when they bribe foreign officials to get or inflate contracts, or obtain licences and concessions”.

Italy, Canada, Australia, Austria and Finland, which held 8.3% of global exports, were classified as having moderate enforcement, while South Africa, France, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Argentina, Portugal and New Zealand, holding 7.6% of total exports, had limited enforcement.

The progress report for this year showed that 22 countries – accounting for 27% of worldwide exports – had little or no enforcement, threatening the convention’s fundamental goal of creating a corruption-free level playing field for global trade.

These countries comprised Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Russia, Spain, Belgium, Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, Poland, Turkey, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Chile, Israel, Slovak Republic, Colombia, Greece, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Estonia.

Transparency International chairperson José Ugaz explained that enforcement was low, owing to a lack of political backing for investigators to hold companies accountable, particularly where the considerations of national economic interest trumped anticorruption commitments.

Investigators also often lacked the resources to investigate complex white-collar crime.

“There are a few improvements, but the performance of the majority of the 40 countries that agreed to combat foreign bribery in international business transactions is far from satisfactory,” Transparency International said.

Canada and New Zealand emerged as the only two countries to improve, while Bulgaria and Denmark both regressed from being in the limited enforcement category last year to the little or no enforcement category in 2014.

The classification of other countries remained the same.

“For the antibribery convention to achieve a fundamental change in the way companies operate, we need a majority of leading exporters to be actively enforcing it, so that the other countries will be pressured to follow suit. Unfortunately, we are a long way from that tipping point and that means the vision of corruption-free global trade remains far away,” explained Ugaz.

Transparency International pointed out that the four leading enforcers, namely Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the US, had completed 225 cases and started 57 new cases from 2010 to 2013.

Thirty-five other countries completed 20 and started 53 during the same period, while 20 countries had not brought any criminal charges for major cross-border corruption by companies in the last four years.