Freakonomics has an interesting article on pending parking tickets for a number of embassies in Washington D.C. and New York.
In 2003, the state department issued dire warnings to embassies in New York and D.C. threatening to withhold foreign assistance if parking tickets were not paid. So far though, it seems no foreign assistance has been withheld.
Here’s D.C.’s top offenders:
Russia – $27,200
Yemen – $24,600
Cameroon – $19,520
France – $19,520
Mauritania – $8,070The Holy See, it’s worth noting, has only one outstanding ticket for $25.
In New York, the list of top offenders is a different set:
Egypt – $1,929,142
Kuwait – $1,266,901
Nigeria – $1,019,998
Indonesia – $692,200
Brazil – $608,733So what do these countries have in common? Oil wealth? Moxie? In 2006, Forbes Magazine hypothesized that it was the level of a country’s corruption (according to the Corruption Perception Index) that predicted the level of parking ticket delinquency, along with a country’s level of anti-American sentiment.