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

Desarrollo y sα‰fl

Septiembre de 1999          jgf` 9

Criminality is much less important in the other regions of the world and,
with the exception of Africa for homicide rates, more comparable to what
may be observed in high-income countries. However, it must be kept in
mind that there may be a serious underreporting bias for robberies in
many of these countries in comparison with high-income countries. It
must also recalled that there may a lot of diversity behind the median
rates shown in Figure la and lb. For instance, the figures for Asia certainly
do not mean that criminality is uniformly lower there than in the rest of
the world. The homicide rate in Thailand is one of the highest in the world
-20∕hti- and that of India is comparable to the homicide rate in the US.

Civen the lack of comparability of crime rates across countries the time
dimension in Figure 1 may be more relevant than the cross-sectional
dimension. From that point of view a clear upward trend seems to be
present in various regions either throughout the period, or at least over
the last 5 to 10 years. This is most noticeable for Latin .∖merica, and the
Eastern Europe and (!entrai Asia region, for both homicide and robbery
rates. There also seems to be an increasing trend in the robbery rate in
high-income countries.

It is unfortunately not possible to consider longer historical trends in the
preceding regions with the same degree of precision. There seems to be
evidence that, overall, crime and violence has been falling since the
beginning of the 19th century see, for instance, Chcsnais (1981)-. But
this process may not be continuous. For instance the evolution of homicide
rates in developed western societies may have followed a J curve, the bottom
of the curve having been reached around 193()^b.

On the whole, the few aggregate data reviewed in this section suggests
that at all levels of development there is a considerable heterogeneity of
countries with respect to the extent of criminality. This is a little less so
when countries are grouped by regions, especially because of the
concentration of most lai: countries at the upper end of the criminality
range. Yet there remains a considerable heterogeneity within practically
all regions. That crime rates changed significantly in various countries
and regions over the last IOyears at different levels of development shows

⁴ An hypothesis due to the historian T. Curr.

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