Freedom in East Asia 2008: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan first, Burma and North Korea last

Freedom-house, “an independent non-governmental organization that supports the expansion of freedom in the world”, issues an annual report called “Freedom of the World” detailing ranking for freedom in countries around the world. The report ranks every country on a seven point scale in two categories – “political rights” (PR) and “civil liberties” (CL), 1 being the highest and 7 the lowest.

To discuss democracy in East-Asia in one of my courses I made a summary of the report for East-Asia, and I thought I’d share it with you. Following are the rankings for the East Asian countries from best ranked to lowest, first score is PR followed by CL and the change from last year (up for improvement, down for worse) :

• Japan – 1, 2
• South Korea – 1, 2
• Taiwan – 2, 1
• Mongolia – 2, 2
• Indonesia – 2, 3
• Philippines – 4, 3
• Malaysia – 4, 4 (down)
• Singapore – 5, 4
• Thailand – 6, 4
• Cambodia – 6, 5
• Brunei – 6, 5
• Vietnam – 7, 5
• China – 7, 6
• Laos – 7, 6
• Burma – 7,7 (down)
• North Korea – 7, 7

(BTW – and … Israel : 1 ,2)

The summary chart for the Asia-Pacific region :

More data can be found on “Freedom in the World 2008 Survey Release” (summary charts available here). There’s also a previous post from two years ago about the 2006 East-Asia freedom stats.

Oh yeah, and I just wanted to say I’m proud of the Taiwanese and the South-Koreans, relatively new democracies, for being up there on the top.