Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomafrican | Hacker News Reader

May be I should download the brochure to learn more about the methodology but some of the countries at the bottom seem weird.

North Korea is last ? Is there even room for corruption in the North Korean public sector ? I imagine it being arbitrary and all sort of things but I wouldn't dare attempting to bribe a North Korean official.

Does Somalia even have a public sector ?

View on HN

The Brochure is only one page and has no information about methodology. The most info I could find was "The CPI reflects the views of observers from around the world, including experts living and working in the countries and territories evaluated." from http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/in_detail

Re north Korea, it has an endemic amount of tolerated black market. There have been numerous articles on it.

Ok but is it similar to the Black Market that existed in the 80's in the USSR or closer to the late 90's in Cuba ?

If it's the first case, it's argue that the most corrupt rank isn't deserved. If it's the latter, we're getting close but we're still far from places like Guinea-Bissau.

It's a list of perceived corruption, not of corruption.

I know that(I've lived in countries that were at the time last on the list).

But did they survey North Koreans to discuss said perception ? Is "corrupt" really an equivalent of "bad and arbitrary and awfully run" ?

To me those are two different things.

Corruption is a vague term that describes a whole spectrum of behaviors. I don't know much about NK, but I grew up in a country with planned economy and the most visible aspect of corruption there was rampant bribery. It looks like NK has problems with this too: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/NG13Dg01.html

I'll stand in line for a TL;DR of the methodology. Another thing bothering me is that corruption perception is somewhat relative. In some countries it is normal behaviour to bribe police agents or administration employees. It comes with the job, as a perk and is hardly considered as corruption. This is less likely to change the ranks of the countries, rather the dynamic of the perceived corruption levels.

I recall reading about bribery in North Korea fairly often. I mean, as a foreigner I'm sure it wouldn't get you there, but if you actually live there it sounds fairly common to use bribery to get better jobs, access to schooling, food, or what have you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com