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comentada em 15/07/2014 12:32

By Shaomin Li of Old Dominion University
Obviously, reversing in takes more time and effort than driving in head-on. But it makes it easier, quicker, and safer to exit. So we may conjecture that people who take the trouble to back their cars in demonstrate an ability to delay gratification: they are happy to invest more time and effort now to enjoy the fruits of their labour later.

Economists have recognized that the ability to delay gratification is a valuable behaviour strongly associated with success and higher income. This thought is intriguing: I remember noticing in some countries that more people park by reversing than in other countries. Does this mean people in these countries have a greater ability to delay gratification and therefore do better economically? Based on this conjecture, I conducted a study to document the percentage of people who reverse into parking spots and correlate it with major indicators of economic performance in a number of countries: the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India and China), Taiwan and the US. I observed 759 instances of parking roughly divided among the six countries between May and July this year.

What I found is interesting. China had the highest percentage of reverse parking, at 88 per cent, while the US had the lowest, at 5.7 per cent. The other three Brics had relatively low reverse parking rates ranging from 17.1 per cent in Brazil, to 25.4 per cent in India and 35 per cent in Russia. Taiwan, like China, had a high reverse parking rate at 59.4 per cent.