North Korea ranked the lowest in a world democracy index last year for the 16th consecutive year, a recent report showed.
  
North Korea placed at the bottom among the 167 countries polled, with an overall score of 1.08 out of a total of 10, according to the Democracy Index 2020 published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research division of the British weekly The Economist.
  
The North has ranked the lowest in the EIU index since the agency began compiling the data in 2006.
  
The agency classified North Korea as an "authoritarian regime" out of four categories, which includes "full democracy," "flawed democracy" and "hybrid regime."
  
The North scored zero in electoral process and civil liberties, and received low scores of 2.50 and 1.67 for functioning of government and political participation, respectively.
  
Meanwhile, South Korea moved up the index from the "flawed democracy" category in 2015 to a "full democracy" last year.
  
The agency said South Korea was among the few countries that "went much further than the rest of the world in tracking and policing their citizens and locking them down" in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Yonhap)