A study by Shaomin Li, Old Dominion University Eminent Scholar and professor of international business, was featured on National Public Radio.

Reporter Shankar Vedantam, who does a segment for NPR called "Hidden Brain" on social science research, interviewed Li about a study the ODU professor did on parking tendencies and their correlation with economic growth.

Li's study, "Predicting Productivity Gains from Parking Behavior," looked at the parking behavior of citizens of the United States, along with the parking behavior in four rapidly growing BRIC economies - Brazil, Russia, India and China - as well as Taiwan, looking at the percentage of motorists who back into parking spots, rather than pull in front-first. The study will appear in the International Journal of Emerging Markets.

According to Li's research, motorists who back into parking stalls are exercising what is known as delayed gratification, and that could serve as a novel way to predict economic performance across countries by observing the way people park their cars.

Vedantam told Morning Edition host David Greene that Li noticed something unique on a recent visit to Taiwan. "His host drove him to different places - to meetings and restaurants and so forth. And he noticed that every time they parked their cars in a parking lot, they backed in - they reversed into their parking spots - and this told him something very interesting."

Li told Vedantam the uniformity of extra effort in parking was telling to him.

"When they parked, they took effort - elaborate effort - to wiggle in, reverse. They never park head-in. All of a sudden I said, gee, isn't this delayed gratification?"

Listen to the NPR story HERE.

What Li found is that China has the highest percentage of back-in parking, 88 percent, and the U.S. has the lowest percentage at 5.7 percent, with the other three BRIC countries having relatively low back-in parking rates ranging from 17.1 percent in Brazil, to 25.4 percent in India, to 35 percent in Russia. Taiwan, like China, also has a high back-in parking rate at 59.4 percent.

To answer whether there is a relationship between parking and economic performance, Li overlaid the back-in parking rates with some major economic performance indicators for to see if any relationship exists. He found that there was one.

From the study, Li will develop a "Global Parking Index" for all researchers to use to study world economic development.

Li studied in China and also worked in his home country as a business executive, qualifying him to be an expert witness before the U.S. Congress on China's reform. Li is the author of 14 books and more than 100 articles, which have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of International Business Studies, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and many other publications. In 2008, he received Virginia's top honor for university faculty, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) Outstanding Faculty Award.