World Ten percent of North Koreans are slaves — and report finds surprisingly high numbers in US and UK Modern slavery is heavily woven into global value chains, and we all use products at least partially produced by enslaved workers, the 2018 Global Slavery Index shows BL PREMIUM

New York — North Korea and Eritrea have the world’s highest rates of enslaved people. And, while slavery is far more prevalent in the developing world, powerhouse economies in the developed world have surprisingly high rates of forced labour, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index, published by the human rights group Walk Free Foundation. The global survey, released on Thursday, focuses on the roles of conflict and government repression in modern slavery. In addition to North Korea and Eritrea, the central African nation of Burundi also has a high prevalence of slavery. "Each of these three countries has state-sponsored forced labour, where their government puts its own people to work for its own benefit," said Fiona David, research chair of the Minderoo Foundation, which led the data collection. More than 40-million people were enslaved around the world in 2016, according to an estimate by the Walk Free Foundation and the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

India was...