Corruption Travels Globally

From the conculsion of an NBER research paper titled "CULTURES OF CORRUPTION: EVIDENCE FROM DIPLOMATIC PARKING TICKETS:"

We exploit a unique natural experiment – the stationing in New York City of thousands of government officials from 146 countries around the world – in a setting of zero legal enforcement of parking violations to construct a revealed preference measure of official corruption. We find that this measure is strongly correlated with existing measures of home country corruption. This finding suggests that cultural or social norms related to corruption are quite persistent: even when stationed thousands of miles away, diplomats behave in a manner highly reminiscent of officials in the home country. Norms related to corruption are apparently deeply engrained, and factors other than legal enforcement are important determinants of corruption behavior.

See the top 15 countries for NYC parking violations in the chart above (click to enlarge), Kuwait is #1, by far.