“North Korea is the most corrupt country in the world,” the Anti-Corruption Association said in a report, marking the second consecutive year that the Democratic Republic has won the title.
It is characteristic that Trace International ranked North Korea in the 194th place out of the … 194 countries in its table. He singled out the characteristics of corruption as follows: business interactions with government entities, deterrence and enforcement against corruption, transparency of government and public service, and ability to oversee civil society.
The nonprofit, which provides multinational corporate support, described North Korea, among others, as the “most corrupt” in three of the four categories. In fact, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was the only country to score 100 out of 100 – the worst possible score – in many categories, surpassing Turkmenistan, Eritrea and Venezuela.
Transparency of government and public services was the only category in which North Korea was not ranked as the worst, a title that belonged to Yemen.
“I think the reason corruption is endemic in North Korea is because there is no responsibility; and the opacity of the regime is extreme,” Go Myong-hyun, a researcher at the Asan Institute for Political Studies, told NK News on Friday.
Corruption has been deeply entrenched in North Korea since the country’s economy collapsed in the early 1990s and, according to DPRK expert Andrei Lankov, has become “part of the fabric of everyday life” in the country today. However, corruption helps also in ensuring the survival of people in a society where goods and services are distributed from the top.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has stressed the need to fight corruption in the ranks of the Korean Workers’ Party, saying in 2020 that officials who violate human rights should be punished “mercilessly”. More recently, corruption was at the top of the agenda during a plenary session of the Party’s Eighth Congress in January 2021, with Kim saying the party would vigorously investigate “violations of party discipline, abuse of power, irregularities and corruption.” .
AP
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