By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
Almost half the Korean population are pessimistic on the transparency of Korean society, according to a survey by Transparency International (TI), a global civil society organization against corruption. However, it is less than the world average standing at 54 percent.
TI annually surveys the general public's perceptions of corruption and experience with bribery all over the world and announces ``the Global Corruption Barometer (GCB).'' This year, TI polled 63,199 people from 60 countries and there were about 1,000 Koreans among them.
According to GCB 2007, 47 percent of Korean respondents said in the next three years corruption will increase. While 19 percent of them said they think the country's corruption would stay the same, 34 percent of them said corruption would decrease.
Among all the respondents across the world, 54 percent chose ``increase,'' 26 percent said ``stay the same'' and 20 percent said ``decrease.'' By continent, Asia Pacific countries are the most pessimistic on transparency of their countries.
Among Asian countries, Indian people have the worst views of corruption as 90 percent of them said corruption would increase in the country.
Regarding questions, ``To what extent do you perceive the following sectors in this country or territory to be affected by corruption?'' Koreans saw political parties as the most vulnerable sector to corruption, followed by parliament, judicature and the media.
As for the percentage of respondents who paid bribes, Korea showed only one percent, indicating very low compared to the world average of 13 percent. With regard to respondents' evaluation of their government's effort to fight corruption, 69 percent of Koreans answered ineffective, seven percent of them said neither effective nor ineffective and 24 percent said effective. The world average on government's performance, 54 percent said ineffective and 28 percent said effective.
Meanwhile, TI also announced the ``Corruption Perceptions Index'' (CPI) score, which indicates the degree of public sector corruption as perceived by business people and country analysts, ranges between 10 (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt). Korea ranked 43rd place with Malaysia and South Africa among 180 countries.