Tim Harford, the author of The Undercover Economist, has a most depressing line in a recent column. He says:
“We can try to earn money by doing something useful, or we can try to steal or extort it from other people. A society where most people are doing something useful has a good chance of being rich; a society full of corruption will be poor.”
Harford quotes a recent study by the economists Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel of parking violations by diplomats to underline his point about corruption.
From 1997-2005, the famously incorruptible Scandinavians committed only 12 unpaid parking violations, and most of them were by a single criminal mastermind from Finland. But over the same period of time, Chad and Bangladesh, regularly at the top of the corruption tables, managed to produce more than 2,500 violations between them.
Also see: Is corruption in our bloody genes?
churumuri 
I think the study only shows that countries where people believe they can get away with traffic violations do the same in the US of A as well. It perhaps shows that rich people in poor countries behave worse than rich in rich countries…
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Ditto Alok’s Sentiments. Read honor-system Bagel payment story in Steven Levitt’s “Freakonomics.”
For those who haven’t read, it’s a research done on who’s honest: Rich or Poor? And the Oscar goes to……..
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