Sunday, February 04, 2007

Here's a great applied statistics paper-- researchers at Columbia and UC Berkeley correlated national corruption indices with unpaid parking tickets for UN diplomats. There's a pretty strong correlation, it seems, but what struck me was the dramatic number of parking tickets some countries rack up.

I've excerpted the top ten from their research:


Average Unpaid Annual New York City Parking Violations per Diplomat,
11/1997 to 11/2002


KUWAIT 246.2 Violations per diplomat (9 UN Diplomats in 1998)


EGYPT 139.6 Violations per diplomat (24 UN Diplomats in 1998)


CHAD 124.3 Violations per diplomat (2 UN Diplomats in 1998)


SUDAN 119.1 Violations per diplomat (7 UN Diplomats in 1998)


BULGARIA 117.5 Violations per diplomat (6 UN Diplomats in 1998)


MOZAMBIQUE 110.7 Violations per diplomat (5 UN Diplomats in 1998)


ALBANIA 84.5 Violations per diplomat (3 UN Diplomats in 1998)


ANGOLA 81.7 Violations per diplomat (9 UN Diplomats in 1998)


SENEGAL 79.2 Violations per diplomat (11 UN Diplomats in 1998)


PAKISTAN 69.4 Violations per diplomat (13 UN Diplomats in 1998)

(from pg. 19)



Here's the abstract: Cultures of Corruption: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets