IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/dbl/dblwop/1786.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Inequality and Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean: New Data for and Old Question

Author

Listed:
  • Schargrodsky, Ernesto
  • Freira, Lucía

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between inequality and crime, with a focus on the Latin America and Caribbean region.We find a significant, positive, and robust association between these variables. The results persist if one instruments for inequality with historical variables in crime regressions, suggesting that a causal interpretation of the estimated effect is reasonable. Moreover, inequality is the only variable showing this robust regularity. Education levels, economic activity, income per capita, and poverty show weaker and unstable relationships with crime. The analysis of the distribution of crime victimization indicates that men and youth suffer more crime than women and the elderly. By socio-economic strata, high-income groups suffer more victimization relative to poorer groups in LAC countries, but the poor suffer more homicides.

Suggested Citation

  • Schargrodsky, Ernesto & Freira, Lucía, 2021. "Inequality and Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean: New Data for and Old Question," Research Department working papers 1786, CAF Development Bank Of Latinamerica.
    • Handle: RePEc:dbl:dblwop:1786
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://scioteca.caf.com/handle/123456789/1786
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Desarrollo; Pobreza; Políticas públicas;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:dbl:dblwop:1786. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Pablo Rolando (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cafffve.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.