Crime as a Social Cost of Poverty and Inequality: A Review Focusing on Developing Countries

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Crime as a Social Cost of Poverty
and Inequality: A Review Focusing
on Developing Countries*

F, Bourguignon**

Introduction

When rural life was still dominant in nowadays industrialized countries,
cities were often seen by villagers as the domain of evil, the realm of
corruption and violence. The process of accelerated urbanization and
economic development was then seen as inherently wicked. The widely
publicized criminality and violence observed today in several metropolises
of both the developed and developing world would seem to justify a
posteriori this bucolie bias. The alarming surge of crime and violence in
Mexico, Rio or Sao Paulo during the last 20 years or so might indeed be
the result of an excessively rapid growth of these ⁱgigapolises'. Likewise,
the increasing minor criminality experienced today in many large cities’
suburbs in developed countries might be the delayed consequences of an
urbanization process which was too quick and insufficiently controlled.

Yet, all experiences arc not alike. There are big cities in the world where
crime and violence rates are at a tolerable level and have shown no sign of
increasing with their geographical or demographic size. They may have
other problems like pollution or congestion, but they show that
urbanization is not necessarily that evil and that economic development

*  [ thank Pablo Fajniylbcr, Daniel Ledernian and Nonnan Loayza for allowing me to extensively use

their data base and regression results. I also thank Juan Luis Londnno and David (Juerrcro for
making available an early version of their forthcoming book on violence in Latin America. The
revised version of this paper benefited from useful remarks and comments by Anjum Akaf and
Shahid Yusuf

“ Profesor e investɪgador en la Escuela Normal Superior. Delta, Paris

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