Abstract
The study examined the determinants of crimes in Nigeria from economic and socioeconomic perspectives: A macro-level analysis using a time series data covering the period of 1990 to 2014. Both economic and socio-economic factors that determinant crime were included in the model. The economic factors include GDP per capita; male unemployment rate; female unemployment rate and poverty rate while the socioeconomic-demographic factors include higher education enrolment; urban population and rural population. The study embraces the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to empirically analyze the model since the variables were stationary at levels I(0) and first difference I(1). The empirical results in the long-run indicated that gross domestic product per capita and female unemployment rate was found to have a negative significant effect on crime rate in Nigeria while urban and rural population, male and female unemployment rate were found to have a positive significant effect on crime rate in Nigeria. Also, the results of the short-run indicated that gross domestic product per capita and higher education was found to have a negative significant effect on crime rate in Nigeria while urban population, male unemployment rate and poverty rate were found to have a positive significant effect on crime rate in Nigeria in the short-run. Therefore, for a country like Nigeria to reduce criminal activities in the country, there must be an increase in the income of the people. Also, government should invest more in education because it makes the people more rational and more risk averse and so it reduces the propensity to commit crimes. Therefore, higher education attainment will be the cure for criminal activities in Nigeria. Government should also create more jobs because high unemployment rates will compel people to commit crimes and this will increase crime rate in Nigeria. Lastly, there should be high budgetary provision towards poverty alleviation programme because higher poverty may lead to higher crimes rate due to depression or mental illness associated with being poor and this will decreases the rate of return of legal activities and more likely to increase return of illegal activities.
Highlights
Crime is an activity which is against the law and the fact that the linkage between criminal activities and the socioeconomic development of the society is undeniable
The higher education enrolment was 988,635 yearly and this means that there is a high rate in the enrolment in education in Nigeria with enough job which in turn lead to high rate in crime in Nigeria
Urban population is 50,516,000 which is lower than rural population of 81,432,000 while unemployment among male is higher than that of female and poverty rate in Nigeria was 59.62% which is very high to encourage more crime
Summary
Crime is an activity which is against the law and the fact that the linkage between criminal activities and the socioeconomic development of the society is undeniable. Economic of crimes is an illegal acts in which offenders’ principal motivation appears to be economic gain [3] This conceived of any offense in which individuals or collectivities of people. Murder which is a clear example of violent crimes was 1,629 in 1994 This number steadily increased to 2,120 in 2001 and climbed to a record high of 2,136 in 2003 [5]. 10,771 cases of armed robbery were reported to the police in 2006; the number steadily increased to 14,400 in 2007 and 16,312 in 2011. This is a clear rise of over 43 percent in less than 5 years. This research work is sets to study both the economic and socioeconomic determinants of crime in Nigeria: A macro-level analysis
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