Local inequality and crime: New evidence from South Africa

Nicolas Büttner ()
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Nicolas Büttner: ETH Zürich, Development Economics Group

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2025, vol. 23, issue 4, No 14, 1337-1385

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between socio-economic inequalities of various dimensions and crime at the local level in South Africa. It uses a novel panel dataset of police precincts that combines crime records from the South African Police Service with socio-economic data from two population censuses and household surveys. The identification exploits variation of inequality and crime across time and space, controlling for socio-economic and demographic characteristics of police precincts, province-specific time trends, police cluster-fixed effects, and spatial correlations. I find robust evidence for a significant, positive, and linear relationship between income inequality within precincts and local rates of violent crime, and an inverted u-shaped relationship with property crime. Education and housing inequality and racial heterogeneity are also positively correlated with crime. While inter-racial inequality contributes more to property crime, intra-racial inequality contributes more to violent crime. Richer precincts display higher property crime rates as compared to their poorer neighbors.

Keywords: Crime; Local inequality; Small area estimation; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D74 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s10888-024-09662-5

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