Determinants of crime in a developing country: a regression model

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a sharp rise in crime levels in most of the societies across the world. Apart from the increasing direct costs involved in the containment/control of crime, the subject societies also bear considerable psychic costs (results of fear of crime or the after effects of crime). These costs of crime are perceived to be higher in developing economies. Economists consider crime to be rational behaviour under specific scenarios is sparse. In this paper, we characterize the rising-crime scenarios in terms of several demographic and economic variables. Regression models relating different types of crime to these societal variables are fitted, using crime data from Malaysia (from published records of the Government of Malaysia). The model fit is found to be extremely good with most of these observational data.