Economists at Columbia and Berkeley have developed a new way to measure a country’s corruption: find out how often their UN diplomats don’t pay their parking tickets.

Prior to November 2002, UN diplomats in New York City faced no penalties for not paying their parking tickets. So, theorized Ray Fisman of Columbia and Edward Miguel of Berkeley, if some delegations were ticketed less, that could be a proxy for their cultural tolerance of corruption. After all, “… Corruption … is ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.’” Would there be a pattern as to which diplomats broke the law, even if there were no consequences?

Their finding: “diplomats from high corruption countries … have significantly more parking violations, and these differences persist over time.” The correlation between standard country corruption measures and the NYC data is “positive and large.”

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The regions with the highest number of unpaid parking tickets per diplomat were Africa and the Middle East. The worst countries were Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria.

The ‘best’ countries: Turkey, Sweden, Panama, Oman, Norway, Latvia, and Japan (although Turkey and Oman have high rates of violation but pay the fines). Scandinavia was the best region (according to comments at Marginal Revolution, “one bad Finn” dragged down the average).

In another example of the miracle of prices — and consequences for bad behavior — when US law was amended in late 2002 to a) allow the city to tow diplomatic vehicles, b) cancel UN parking permits, and c) empower the US to deduct unpaid tickets from foreign aid, total parking violations (paid and unpaid) fell from well over 1,000 per month to under 100. But the more corrupt countries still received more tickets per person.

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H/t: Marginal Revolution

The paper is behind a subscription wall at the National Bureau of Economic Research, but there is a working paper version here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 11:08 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under I knew I'd use my Econ major. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.