By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Korean adolescents are the least transparent and ethical among four Asian countries, with more than one fifth preferring being rich to being honest, necessitating better education on morality and law observance.
Transparency International Korea said Friday that Korean teenagers got the lowest mark in the Youth Integrity Index, which it conducted in September, on middle and high school students of four countries _ Korea, Bangladesh, India and Mongolia.
Out of a score of 10, Bangladeshi youths scored 8.45, followed by Indian at 7.55, Mongolian 6.64 and Korean 6.11.
As for wealth being more important than honesty, 3.1 percent of Bangladeshi students, 8.4 percent of Indian, and 9.1 percent of Mongolian said it was, while 22.6 percent of Koreans agreed. Less than half of Korean youths, or 45.8 percent, said honesty was more important than wealth.
Korean students also had little respect for law. In Bangladesh, 7.2 percent said they might not follow traffic rules if there were no police present, compared to 44.1 percent of Koreans. The percentage was 8.8 in India and 12 in Mongolia.
Korean youths showed low integrity elsewhere as well, saying it is acceptable for their family to get rich by abusing power or breaking the law; it is not necessary for students to specify sources of citation in case they copy articles from the Internet for their homework; and they would cut into a long queue at the cinema.
The report showed that the ranking of the youth index was the reverse of that of the corruption perceptions index (CPI), which indicates the degree of public sector corruption as perceived by business people and country analysts. In the 2008 CPI, Korea ranked 40th, India, 85th, Mongolia, 102nd, and Bangladesh, 147th.
``The index shows how Korea's education on ethics and law observance is poor. If we don't attend to this situation, Korea will not become a transparent, advanced nation,'' Kim Geo-sung, chairperson of the organization, said.