Governmental (In)Eciencies on Detriment of Crime

Agustin A. Shehadi C.

No 4412, Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers from Asociación Argentina de Economía Política

Abstract: By using data from the Ministry of Security of the Argentine Republic for the year 2017, this paper aims to estimate the degree of substitution between public and private spending, placing in the core of study the relationship between the level of government efficiency and private spending on security. With information about the 24 Argentine jurisdictions, this work uses an autoregressive spatial model (SAC), to control for presumed autocorrelation in the residuals, in order to achieve consistent and unbiased estimations. In this line, the discrepancy between reported crimes and the number of convicts jailed under the respective sentence is taken as an efficiency measure of the government. In this way, the results show the expected signs, except for threats, for which the measure of efficiency takes the opposite sign (i.e. as greater the public spending is, greater private expenses), denoting an inefficiency of government spending. We attribute this finding to the fact that individuals perceive governmental action upon threats as insufficient, hence inducing private spending to cover the public inefficiency.

JEL-codes: C54 D12 H23 H53 K40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://aaep.org.ar/works/works2020/Shehadi.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aep:anales:4412

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers from Asociación Argentina de Economía Política Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Juan Manuel Quintero ().