Korea joins the world in commemorating International Anti-Corruption Day on Tuesday. Given that corruption is still pervasive in this society, the anniversary should provide an occasion for Koreans to renew their commitment to fight the social ill.

It is all the more necessary because this year Korea suffered a lot from the consequences of failure to curb corruption ― the tragic Sewol ferry disaster, a series of graft scandals involving defense procurement programs and cases in which politicians were implicated in bribery.

Most of all, the Sewol ferry sinking makes us more somber than ever as we commemorate the International Anti-corruption Day, since corrupt links in the civil service and the marine transportation industry were one of the major causes of the disaster that claimed more than 300 lives.

Even without Sewol and the seemingly endless major corruption scandals that buffet society, we would still have a good idea of where Korea stands globally in terms of corruption. But it still is painful to receive the news about Korea’s latest standing in the global anticorruption index.

Korea scored 55 out of a possible 100 in the Corruption-Perceptions Index announced by Transparency International last week, taking 43rd place among 175 countries and 27th among the 34 members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. The index measures how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be.

It is no surprise where Korea stands by global standards, but what frustrates us is that there are no signs of improvement. There has been little change in both the index and rankings of Korea in recent years.

Our own government assessments also show that there has been little progress on corruption in officialdom. According to the Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission, the Korean civil service’s average integrity index stood at 7.78 out of 10 this year, down from 7.86 last year and the lowest since 7.71 in 2003. In other words, Korea is slipping backward.

This is hardly surprising, if we see what the National Assembly has been doing since the sinking of Sewol in April. The parliament had been dragging its feet on two key anticorruption bills ― one on restricting revolving-door employment and the other on imposing stricter punishments for bribery.

Under mounting public pressure, the Assembly’s Judiciary and Legislation Committee passed the first bill last week, but the fate of the second one ― the so-called Kim Young-ran bill ― is still uncertain. It is inconceivable that parliamentary inaction should be a major hurdle to making this society cleaner and more transparent.