From [font class="arttype"]"[a href="vny!://www.nber.org/papers/w12312"]Cultures of Corruption: Evidence From Diplomatic Parking Tickets[/a]," Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel, Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley
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Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as indicator of national corruption
[/font][font class="arttype"]What makes officials corrupt? Disentangling law and culture is a tricky business, but a pair of economists have come up with an ingenious way to do it:
studying the frequency of parking violations committed by diplomats in New York City. Since, as their study reports, there is "essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations," the authors hypothesized that any cross-national variation in parking-violation rates should flow from culture alone. And sure enough,
diplomats from countries with high levels of corruption were significantly more likely to incur parking tickets, suggesting that cultural factors rather than legal norms drive a great deal of official misconduct.
The worst offenders were Kuwaitis, who accumulated an astonishing 246 violations per diplomat per year from the end of 1997 through 2002, followed by Egyptians, with 140 violations per diplomat per year;
countries whose diplomats [i style="font-weight: bold;"]incurred no parking tickets [/i]
included Canada, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The study also found that officials from countries where the U.S. is less popular were much more likely to park illegally, and that there was a significant drop-off in violations after 9/11, particularly among diplomats from Muslim nations.[/font]
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