- Introduction: The occurrence of crime and the spread of criminal are causing human societies to face social, cultural and economic crises. Reducing feelings of security, undermining public confidence, expanding anti-social behaviour’s psychological pressures, etc., are the consequences of the spread of crime in a society, which a serious impediment to economic growth and development. Therefore, studying and identifying the effective factors which cause these social problems is very important in policy makers’ planning for prevention and reduction of crime in a society. Criminal incident defined as a negative social event that arise from people’s contextual circumstance. Increasing evidence suggests that economic factors may be associated with increase of crime in a society. To provide better evidence of the association between Social Harm and socioeconomic indicators, we evaluated the relation between these two conditions in this study
Method: This study aims to examine this subject through using the statistics of 77 countries (including Iran) and applying the dynamic panel data approach during 1996 - 2013 and generalized method of moments (GMM). To obtain the reliable results and a comprehensive study on this subject, robbery, homicide, and the number of prisoners as the crime indicators and inequality, unemployment, inflation and per capita GDP as the economic conditions are considered.
Findings: The results of the different models show that the economic problems like unemployment, inflation, poverty, and income inequality would increase the possibility of crime commitment by individuals significantly. Also, among the other variables affecting crime commitment, human development and governance index, education and domestic production have had a negative influence and population growth has also had a positive correlation with crime. Also the country population and globalization has also had a positive correlation with crime commitment.
Discussion: In this paper we estimate socioeconomic factors have influence on increase of crime in a society using panel data of the Selected Countries. According to the results, unemployment is the major factor in crime occurrence. Also, inflation in various ways, such as reducing the purchasing power of people, creating class divisions and conflicts, etc., cause people to commit crimes. When people of the society feel that they are in an unfair situation, act in a way that they can show themselves, and they commit a crime to achieve the right that is not foreseen to him. Lack of transparency in the economics of societies, parallel and unnecessary laws, lack of control over corruption, and the possible existence of a crime in general, can increase committing crime by a citizen of a society.
The existence of corruption in society creates a sense of injustice in the citizens and provokes people to act crime, when this phenomenon expands, committing a crime is justified in the custom. In such a situation, imposing heavy punishment can never reduce crime the training is influence development rate and can reduce criminal activity. Economically, it can be argued that an increase in the level of education increases the level of income of an individual; this increase in the level of income can be a reason to reduce the crime rate in the community.
Targeting to reduce crime in society is not possible without identifying the factors. We found that various factors such as unemployment rate, inflation rate, and Gini coefficient, and education, quality of regulation in society and corruption index are the most important factors influencing the use of dental services. The results of this study show a suitable path to officials, planners and policy makers
Type of Study:
orginal |
Received: 2018/08/21 | Accepted: 2018/08/21 | Published: 2018/08/21