A paper by Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel for the National Bureau for Economic Research postulates that the number of parking tickets that legally-immune foreign diplomats acummulate in NYC and refuse to pay is a great measure of how corrupt their home countries are.
The list of violations per diplomat was led by Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, and Bulgaria.
However, one must recall this story from the BBC on how the U.S. diplomatic staff in London have run up unpaid congestion charge fees of£271,000 in the past six months, and that the U.S. embassy has said it does not intend to pay the fees, instead they claim diplomatic privilege.
In fact, the U.S. tops the list followed by Nigeria, Angola, Sudan, then Switzerland.
A spokesman for Transport for London stated: “Last month the United Arab Emirates embassy accepted the principle and have joined the many other embassies who have agreed this is a legitimate charge.
As for countries displaying obedient behavior in NYC, Canada, Sweden, and Norway didn’t have any unpaid tickets while Colombian and Ugandan diplomats paid up almost all their tickets.
Is a paper forthcoming from the NBER on the correlation between unpaid congestion fees and corruption?
