Crime as a Social Cost of Poverty
and Inequality: A Review Focusing
on Developing Countries
R Bourguignon
shall then move to cross-country comparisons involving both developed
and developing countries.
Before doing so one may wonder whether historical trends are in agreement
with the hypothesis that, ceteris paribus, more inequality of relative poverty
should bring about more crime. However, the ceteris paribus condition is
extremely demanding here. For instance, it is well known that inequality
in the UK has been going up throughout the 19th century; leveled off at
the turn of the century, and then went down quite substantially until it
started rising again in the early 1980s. Likewise, inequality in the US is
thought to have peaked around 1930 and then fallen sharply until the
1950s. Mtcrwards. it remained stable before starting to increase again at
the end of the 1970s. According to the simple hypothesis above, we thus
should have seen criminality increasing in the 19th century'and decreasing
during most of the 20th in the IK. The same evolution should have been
observed in the US with a peak around 1930, or possibly' later, allowing for
some delay in the sequence of effects2'. Too many' deep sociological changes
happened at the same time to really’ hope that such a relationship could
be observed. As mentioned above, the general evolution since the beginning
of the 19th century' is one of declining violence, which does not fit well
the evolution of inequality in the UK. The upturn of violence observed in
the 1930s in the US -i.c., the J- curve hypothesis -may not be inconsistent
with a peak of inequality around 1930, but this is indeed very' weak
evidence-. The same inconclusive evidence may be gathered for continental
Europe. Clearly, a much more rigorous analysis controlling for other factors
which may influence the evolution of violence and crime would be necessary,
but all the data necessary for such a long time scries analysis are not
available. As a matter of fact, we shall see that this is already' the case for
more recent periods.
Crime and Inequality in the us in the Recent Past
Ever since the pioneering work of Ehrlich (1973), and in contrast with
the preceding long-run historical perspective, cross-state or cross-city
analyses at a given point in time suggest that indeed income inequality is
positively and significantly associated with crime rates. This is true of
See Lindcrt (1998).
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