Parking tickets, diplomats and corruption
What is the link between culture and corruption? Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel looked at the parking violations of UN diplomats in New York City, the size of UN missions and the ranking of countries in TI's Corruption Perceptions Index. Their conclusion, which many will no doubt take issue with, is that:
A certain amount of corruption is grounded in culture and immune to carrots and sticks.
Scandinavian countries, which perennially rank among the least corrupt in the corruption index, had the fewest unpaid tickets. There were just 12 from the 66 diplomats from Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Almost all of these tickets went to one bad Finn.
Chad and Bangladesh, at the bottom of the corruption index, were among the worst scofflaws. They shirked 1,243 and 1,319 tickets, respectively, in spite of the fact that their UN missions were many times smaller than those of the Scandinavians.
In fact, there is a remarkable concordance between the number of unpaid violations and a country's corruption ranking. This strongly suggests that one's background and experiences, what we might call culture, does indeed contribute to bad behavior.
Here is the working paper. Also see Fisman's work on estimating the value of political connections - which is included in our reading list on the cost of corruption. Another fun UN-corruption paper is 'How Much is a Seat on the Security Council Worth.'
Would you agree that TI's CPI score is an accurate measure of culture?
Comments (6)
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Without having yet read the full paper, I will reserve comment for now. But as someone who spent lots of time growing up in and around diplomatic missions, this certainly brings up many old memories and anecdotes. It would be interesting to know if the UN missions are mostly career foreign service staff or political appointments. How does the behavior of DC or Geneva offices compare? Or what about embassies in Brasilia, Kinshasa or Delhi?
From personal experience I can say that the behavior of the diplomatic core as a whole shifts dramatically depending on the country they are in – not just because of the culture of the home country, but because of the type of people that are appointed there. I would also say that diplomatic staff are often not a representative reflection of the countries and people they are meant to represent. Furthermore, my guess is that CPI indicators do a better job of capturing the bureaucratic corruption and nepotism that would carry over to diplomatic missions then evaluating the true ‘culture’ of countries.
Posted by: Pablo H. | May 9, 2006 10:57:41 PM
Advice to Mr. Wolfowitz on Fighting Corruption
http://truckandbarter.com/mt/archives/2006/05/advice_to_mr_wo.html
Posted by: Paul | May 10, 2006 12:36:10 AM
Great great find. Very innovative on their part.
Posted by: World Bank Economist | May 10, 2006 11:30:34 AM
I skimmed the paper and did not spend details looking at regression work,
but glancing at the end result
Kuwait is bad pretty bad with only 9
diplomats.
It sits well with my previous impression of the country. Another factor one has to notice is that kuwait is a wealthier country run by a clique.
So there is less responsibility.
_enjoy
Posted by: DeathValleyWanderer | May 13, 2006 4:30:32 PM
Thanks for posting this. It reflects what we now all know anecdotally and through emerging research - humans do not make decisions based solely on economic considerations. Corruption is of course part of this - decision-making is more widely influenced by bias, prejudice, and other qualitative matters (culture), as well as economic risk and reward. Corruption solutions emerge out of the culture concerned - if there is no collective will to alter cultural norms, then no real change will occur. In another light, public policy based on human behaviour being solely based on economic criteria is fatally flawed. Coca Cola, British America Tobacco, and car companies worked this out a long time ago, and it has taken public policy a little longer.
Posted by: Marcus in the deep south | Jul 23, 2006 7:48:55 AM
I have another theory. People from countries with a high "corruption index" just know better how governments work (or not). And who the governments work for (usually not for the people). So they choose not to support the government by paying fees they can easily avoid.
For example, if government worked for the people, the parking ticket money would go toward building more parking spaces. Novel concept?
Posted by: Katterine | Oct 15, 2008 7:36:31 AM