Forbes and Jon Bruner look at unpaid parking tickets from UN Diplomats compared to the corruption levels in their home countries.
The correlation between political corruption and parking violations is statistically robust, but a quick comparison between the two maps suggests that it’s not universal. Russia and China, both of which score poorly on the Transparency International index, had fewer than 10 outstanding parking tickets per diplomat when the study was conducted–perhaps because they have generally professional foreign services that try to avoid the appearance of taking advantage of diplomatic immunity. And Kuwait, the worst parking offender with 246 unpaid tickets per diplomat, has a middling corruption score of 4.5–better than China’s.
Fisman and Miguel also found that countries where the U.S. is viewed unfavorably tended to accumulate more unpaid tickets than those where the U.S. is popular, and they note that diplomatic parking violations plummeted during the brief spike in international goodwill that the United States enjoyed just after September 11, 2001.
In any case, most U.N. diplomats have improved their parking behavior since 2002, when the U.S. began withholding parking fines from foreign aid payments: violations fell by 90% immediately after the measure was passed. Nevertheless, Egypt still owed $1.9 million in unpaid parking fines last year, leading a list of countries that owed a collective $18 million. That sounds like a big number, but it’s probably much, much smaller than the positive economic and social impact that New York City enjoys from being the seat of world government.
Photo credit: Forbes/Transparency International
Hat Tip: Freakonomics
