Inequality and crime in Latin America and the Caribbean: new data for an old question

Ernesto Schargrodsky and Lucia Freira

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to revisit 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. 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. With due caution, the use of historical variables to instrument for inequality in crime regressions suggests that a causal interpretation of this relationship is plausible. In addition, the analysis of the distribution of crime victimization indicates that men suffer more crime than women, and that the male-to-female homicide ratio grows with inequality. By socio-economic strata, high-income groups suffer more victimization relative to poorer groups in LAC countries, but the poor suffer more homicides.

Keywords: crime; inequality; poverty; Latin America and Caribbean (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 K40 O15 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2023-11-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam
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Published in Economía, 8, November, 2023, 22(1), pp. 175 – 202. ISSN: 1529-7470

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120908/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Inequality and Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean: New Data for and Old Question (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:120908

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