Sources of crime in the state of Veracruz: The role of female labor force participation and wage inequality

Abstract

In recent years, crime has become a serious concern in Mexico as its increase has detrimentally affected government institutions and economic growth. There is considerable speculation among policy analysts about the causes of the increase in crime. Whereas some analysts attribute the increase to a rise in income inequality, others believe internal migration and a loss of morals are the roots of criminal behavior. This research shows that at least for the Mexican state of Veracruz, wage inequality and labor force participation have an important impact on crime. When gender is considered, however, the impact is more complicated than it seems. An increase in women's labor force participation decreases the overall number of alleged violent offenders. However, the number of alleged rapists and grievous bodily harm offenders increases as women's wage distribution improves. The results shed light on the gender dimensions of the economics of crime.     

国际化背景下金融犯罪趋势与防范研究

经济全球化发展到后来必然是金融的全球化,随之而来的则是金融犯罪的全球化趋势。为此,及早研究和解决金融犯罪的国际化是我们将面临的一个重要课题。作者论述了金融犯罪国际化的特征,分析了我国金融犯罪国际化的一些主要趋势,在此基础上,提出了防范和打击金融犯罪国际化的对策建议。     

Does state-level per capita income affect juvenile delinquency? An empirical analysis for Indian states

While average juvenile crime rates across India has dropped in recent decades, juvenile property crime rates (total juvenile crimes divided by state population) has actually gone up from 15% in 2000-01 to about 20% in 2013-14. There is huge variation across states when it comes to juvenile crime rates. The literature on juvenile crime in the Indian context is scant. This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by undertaking a comprehensive analysis of juvenile delinquency related to property crimes across Indian states. Results show that state income per capita has a non-linear impact on incidences of juvenile crime across Indian states - rising when the income starts growing for relatively poorer states but increasing at a diminishing rate when state income per capita rises further. When a poor state gets relatively richer, both opportunities to commit crime and returns from property crime increases. However, as the state grows even richer, growth of employment and state facilities including rehabilitation and redistribution, improve. Further, we find that states with the lowest income per capita and highest level of adult crime face the steepest increase in juvenile crime rates for a rise in state income per capita.     

Search for a theory of organized crimes

Casual empirical observations reveal no systematic relationship between the overall crime rate and organized criminal activity. We develop a search-theoretic framework to study the interactions not only between formal labor and crime sectors but also between individual and organized crimes. In equilibrium, individual and organized criminals face different arrest risks, success rates, reward structures and outside options. We characterize agents' “occupational choices,” the gang's hierarchical structure and the responses of unemployment, crime rates and crime composition to changes in labor-market conditions and crime-deterrence policies. We further assess the effectiveness of arrest versus punishment policies in deterring individual and organized crimes.     

The economic analysis of offender’s choice: Old and new insights

The economics of crime has followed the basic Becker model (1968), according to which a criminal act results from a rational decision based on cost-benefit analysis. This paper surveys some extensions to Becker’s model, by giving some emphasis to earlier work that tries to explain differences in offender’s choice across places. At the end, the paper analyses the contribution of Steven Levitt (the new Gary Becker), which has stimulated an empirical renaissance in the economic analysis of crime. His new book (co-author Dubner) Freakonomics (2005) offers a new argument in understanding why crime fell in the 1990s in the USA. I am very grateful to an anonymous referee for his valuable comments, which improved the final version of this paper. I would also like to thank Steven Levitt for sending me his unpublished work. The usual disclaimer applies.     

中国参与北极国际合作研究综述

1925年 《斯匹茨卑尔根群岛条约》的签订，标志着中国开始参与北极国际合作。当前，北极问题正逐步成为一个全球性问题，我国作为近北极国家，北极地区的气候、环境的变化将对我国的生态、经济等各方面产生重大影响，我国参与北极国际合作刻不容缓。本研究主要从参与北极科研、经济、治理合作三个方面对已有文献进行整理分析，以对我国参与北极国际合作进行整体概述。可以发现，当前对北极国际合作研究的相关文献有逐年增长趋势，但对北极国际经济合作进行综合分析的文献并不多，随着冰上丝绸之路建设提出及《中国的北极政策》颁布，对中国参与北极国际经济合作的研究将会是以后的一个重要方向。     

Property Rights,Predation, and Productivity*

I develop a neoclassical growth model with imperfect property rights in which predation entails both waste of resources and deadweight losses. According to the model, in the United States, the welfare costs of crime represent a loss of 18.6 percent of consumption per capita. This loss is 57.8 percent for a country in the average of the last decile of the distribution of an index of business costs of crime across 94 countries. An increase of one standard deviation in the institutional quality index increases GDP per worker by 23 percent for a country in the average of the last decile of its distribution.     

ICT Investment and Economic Growth in the 1990s: Is the United States a Unique Case?: A Comparative Study of Nine OECD Countries

This paper compares the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) capital accumulation on output growth in Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Over the past two decades, ICT contributed between 0.2 and 0.5 percentage point per year to economic growth, depending on the country. During the second half of the 1990s, this contribution rose to 0.3 to 0.9 percentage point per year. Despite differences between countries, the United States has not been alone in benefiting from the positive effects of ICT capital investment on economic growth nor was the United States the sole country to experience an acceleration of these effects. ICT diffusion and ICT usage play a key role and depend on the right framework conditions, not necessarily on the existence of a large ICT-producing sector.     

ASSESSING THE IMPACTS OF LABOR MARKET AND DETERRENCE VARIABLES ON CRIME RATES IN MEXICO

Many studies examine the relationship between crime rates and various economic and/or sociodemographic variables in high income countries, but similar efforts for middle and low income countries are less common. Utilizing an 8‐year panel data sample for all 32 states in Mexico, this study assesses the impact of Mexican labor market and deterrence variables on various Mexican crime rates. The principal results indicate that: (1) State gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has ambiguous effect on crime rates under different conditions. Both wages and unemployment rates are negatively linked with crime rates. (2) Although the Mexican judicial and public security systems are widely believed to be ineffective, increased federal police forces and incarceration rates are associated with lower crime rates, but higher public security expenditure per capita is associated with higher crime rates. (3) The impacts from labor market and deterrence variables presented in (1) and (2) continue to hold under the Fox administration as well as for non‐border states. Their respective impacts diminish, however, under the Calderon administration as well as for border states because of the small number of observations. Overall, the results indicate that increasing average wages, federal police forces, and incarceration rates would have significant impacts on reducing crime rates in Mexican states. (JEL O54, K42)     

Organized crime and wage inequality

This paper stresses the role of industrial organization of crime, and explores how organized crime affects wage inequality. We find that, when only unskilled workers (or both skilled and unskilled workers) engage in organized crime, an increase in the number of criminal groups will increase wage inequality if (1) the skilled sector is more capital intensive than the unskilled sector, and (2) the price elasticity of demand for the skilled product is large enough. However, when there are only skilled workers engaging in organized crime, condition (1) is sufficient to widen wage inequality, irrespective of the price elasticity.     

高低级别公职人员经济犯罪行为决策差异分析

公职人员经济犯罪决策受到需求动机、"进入"成本、道德自律三个条件约束。在引入公职人员效用函数的基础上,得出影响公职人员经济犯罪决策的因素是效用偏好结构、既有效用量、相对效用量、犯罪金额。研究结果表明:个人效用偏好结构不同导致高低级别公职人员经济犯罪决策的差异;就财富指标而言,高级别比低级别公职人员经济犯罪倾向性小,但一旦高级别公职人员发生经济犯罪,其犯罪金额较大;就相对效用指标而言,高级别比低级别公职人员经济犯罪倾向性大。     

Unity versus Collaboration: Construction of China's Belt and Road Free Trade Agreement 2.0 Network

In the context of the United States prioritizing bilateral as well as trilateral trade agreements and China's regional economic integration strategy based on the Belt and Road (B&R) Initiative, the B&R free trade agreement (FTA) and the US–European–Japanese FTA (UEJFTA) have become the two regional economic integration processes with the greatest potential impact on the world economic landscape. The present paper examines the game situation as well as the economic effects of China's B&R‐FTA 2.0 network against the United States' UEJFTA to study the optimization of China's B&R FTA system. By constructing a four‐country extended game model under a two‐part expansion, we find that an increase in members will promote the welfare of each country when there is a single regional trade agreement; the potential member countries tend to choose larger organizations for higher economic benefits when there are several regional trade agreements. Our quantitative simulation shows that promoting the construction of the FTA 2.0 network based on the B&R can significantly alleviate the impact of FTA entered into by the United States with its major trading partners.     

Demographic change and economic growth: Theory and evidence from China

The paper tests the impact of demographic change on China's economic growth by using 1983–2008 provincial panel data. The deducted result of the theoretical model shows that the share of working-age population is positively correlated with economic growth, whereas birth rate has an adverse impact. Empirical results substantiate the finding. Due to the decrease of birth rate and the increase of the share of the working-age population, China's average annual per capita GDP growth rate increased 1.19 and 0.73 percentage points during the sample period. The contribution of these two demographic changes contributed to 19.5% of the economic growth together.     

Is the skills mismatch important under skill-biased technological change and imperfect substitutability between immigrants and natives?

This paper contributes to the debate on the benefits and costs of immigration, by evaluating how the mismatch between educational attainment and occupations induced by immigration affects output per worker, the wage premium, and the economy's technological level in OECD host countries. To that end, we use an R&D growth model in which technological knowledge can be directed to either low- or high-skilled labour and thereby drives the dynamics of the key economic variables. There tends to be a significant economic impact of the skills mismatch due to immigration, which amplifies the effects of the mismatch in the native population. Nevertheless, countries with a higher contribution of immigration to the skills mismatch are not necessarily those with the higher contribution in terms of economic effects. Moreover, the size and sign of the latter may vary depending on the assessed economic indicator and from country to country. Cross-country differences regarding the initial level of the high-to low-skilled ratio and the size of its shift due to immigration play a crucial role.     

Multi-scale integrated assessment of soybean biodiesel in Brazil

Developing counties are often believed to have excellent conditions for biofuel production, however studies aimed at assessing the sustainability of large scale biofuel programs have generally focused on a few variables related to one scientific domain and one scale. Contrary to this approach, this paper analyzes soybean biodiesel in Brazil using a parallel biophysical and economic assessment at different scales. A Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) approach is applied as a scenario analysis tool. A soybean biodiesel energy balance for the specific conditions of Brazil is included and the energy ratio turns out to be 1.09. This means that the energy delivered is higher than the energy invested, however the net energy is very low. The economic impacts are analyzed through input-output analysis. The results show that soybean biodiesel increases energy consumption per hour of work without a corresponding increase in economic labor productivity. Consequently the already low energy efficiency of Brazilian production could get worse. Although Brazil has large expanses of land, the substitution of 20% fossil diesel (i.e. just 3.3% of the country's primary energy consumption) with fully renewable biodiesel might destroy protected areas and forests and increase the GHGs emitted.     

How Do Digital Technologies Drive Economic Growth?

This paper seeks to provide new empirical evidence that demonstrates the importance of digital technologies in promoting economic growth, drawing on the literature on advances in growth and leveraging a broader and more robust country‐level panel dataset. In particular, this paper estimates the long‐run economic impact of digital technologies using mobile phone penetration and internet usage as broad indicators. The empirical results suggest that, between 2004 and 2014, the diffusion of digital technologies significantly improved economic output in Australia and abroad, contributing to steady‐state gross domestic product per capita growth of approximately 5.8 per cent on average. These findings could serve as the starting‐point for predictions about the likely impact of future technologies, providing a better understanding for policy‐makers in prioritising initiatives that will continue to lift living standards in the coming years.     

China's Outward Direct Investment in Africa

The empirical determinants of China's outward direct investment (ODI) in Africa are examined using an officially approved ODI dataset and a relatively new OECD–IMF format ODI dataset. China's ODI is found responding to the canonical economic determinants that include the market seeking motive, the risk factor, and the resources seeking motive. It is also affected by the intensity of trade ties and the presence of China's contracted projects. A host country's natural resources have an impact on China's decision on how much to invest in the country rather than on whether to invest in the country or not. China's drive for Africa's natural resources is mainly a recent phenomenon and, probably, became prominent after the “Going Global” policy adopted in 2002.     

Gender equality and economic growth in Brazil: A long-run analysis

This paper studies the long-run impact of policies aimed at fostering gender equality on economic growth in Brazil. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based, three-period OLG model that accounts for women’s time allocation between market work, child rearing, human capital accumulation, and home production. Bargaining between spouses depends on relative human capital stocks, and thus indirectly on access to infrastructure. The model is calibrated and various experiments are conducted, including investment in infrastructure, a reduction in gender bias in the market place, and a composite pro-growth, pro-gender reform program. The analysis showed that fostering gender equality, which may partly depend on the externalities that infrastructure creates in terms of women’s time allocation and bargaining power, may have a substantial impact on long-run growth in Brazil.     

从经济学视角考察黑社会性质组织犯罪

用经济学的分析方法系统地分析黑社会性质组织犯罪的犯罪成本和犯罪收益,我们发现黑社会性质组织通过加大行为性成本和物质性成本的投入,可以大幅削减心理惩处成本和惩罚成本,从广度和深度上大规模拓展和垄断犯罪市场,使之几何级倍数增加犯罪收益,从而有可能达到犯罪效益的最大化。从经济学的角度分析黑社会性质组织犯罪心理,掌握黑社会组织犯罪的动机,更有利于打击黑社会组织犯罪。     

扩大进口背景下中国进口对世界经济的影响——制造业就业的视角

伴随着中国经济的快速增长，中国在成为世界第一大出口国的同时也成为世界第二大进口国。以往对中国贸易的研究多是从供给端出发，然而从需求端来看，中国进口对世界经济的影响又有几何？本文在扩大进口战略背景下从全球制造业就业的视角对中国进口与世界经济的关系进行了实证分析，研究发现，通过对中国出口，相关国家的制造业就业实现正增长，但是两者关系会在不同贸易商品、经济发展程度和时间样本之间存在差异。在此基础上，本文进一步从就业创造和就业破坏等方面展开了机制分析。本文的研究表明，中国通过“世界市场”的角色在一定程度上降低了全球失业率，但同时也需警惕“进口竞争”对我国经济的影响。