June 4, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 3, 1424

SEOUL: North and South Korea are divided by a heavily armed border, different political ideologies and an economic gulf, but they share a hot, new trend: Both have been bitten by the lottery bug.

On opposite sides of the Korean peninsula, North and South Koreans have become avid buyers of the lotteries issued by their governments in recent months. North Koreans are spending several billions of won each day to buy state-issued lottery-like bonds that Pyongyang began distributing on May 1. It is the first bond that North Korea has issued in five decades.

The cash-short communist regime has aggressively been marketing the bonds, which are redeemable starting in 2008, “to funnel the private money into the build-up of the national economy,” according to statements by officials of the finance ministry of North Korea.

In South Korea, millions have been flocking to 5,000 “lottery sales stores” to buy some 260 billion won ($216 million) worth of state-issued lotteries each week — with the dream that a win would make them billionaires overnight.

Since these bonds were launched in December, South Koreans have spent more than 1.3 trillion won ($1.08 billion) on the lottery. Reports say lottery sales have produced 70 happy billionaires, all of whom remain anonymous — some, however, have already left to start new lives in places like the United States.

But although the lotteries are supposed to be avenues to wealth, they also reflect the different economic woes that face both North and South Korea.

“To buy some of the lottery bonds, average North Koreans have to hoard several months of wages,” said a South Korean expert on North Korea here.

That is not an easy thing to do, especially since the country’s economic headaches, already severe due to years of drought, famine, poverty and diplomatic isolation, have become greater in the aftermath of Pyongyang’s admission in October of a secret nuclear weapons programme.

In December, in the wake of this admission, the US government suspended delivery of fuel oil to North Korea. Industrial factories in the country have remained heavily underutilized since then because of power shortages. International humanitarian aid has also continued to shrink after Pyongyang’s admission of its nuclear programme.

All of this has driven North Korea to think of new ways, like the lottery, of attracting the funds it badly needs.

Dreams of making it big are also hard to come by in South Korea these days. Amid dropping investment and fears of a crisis in the Korean peninsula or worse, a US attack next door in North Korea, come reports that economic woes are resurfacing in this country.

About 3 million South Koreans have overdue credit-card loans, a statistic that bodes ill for a country where credit-fuelled consumption fuelled the economy’s recovery from the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

These are the group called “bad borrowers” and are denied new credit lines. About 1.5 million of them are in their twenties and thirties — and jobless.

But here the parallels end in the Koreas’ preoccupation with their own lotteries. While Pyongyang is actively pushing its lottery, Seoul is worried that it is becoming a bad habit in difficult times.

In North Korea, a lottery buyer is praised as a ‘patriot’ who helps funnel money into the national economy that badly needs their help. “If overseas Koreans join the bond-buying patriotism, we expect to raise up to 50 billion North Korean won ($330 million),” said Chung Young-Chun, a senior official of North Korea’s finance ministry.

In South Korea, the government is trying to moderate the lottery craze. Officials are worried that people may become addicted to it instead of working hard — although about 40 per cent of profits from the lottery are to be spent for welfare programmes like housing projects.

Meantime, the ‘all or nothing’ rule of the weekly lottery game in South Korea goes on. The odds are that only one out of 8,145,060 lottery issues will hit the jackpot, but winners will get anywhere from 790 million won to 40 billion won ($65,000 to $33 million). The winners are announced in high-profile weekly announcements.

In contrast, North Korean winners are supposed to be paid on a step-by-step basis from Dec 1 2008 through the end of April 2013.

They also have to wait for six-month intervals from December 2003 to end-2007 to find out who wins up to 10, 25 times or up to 50 times the amount they spent on the lottery.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.