About the Relation of Inequality and Poverty with Crime in Mexico

Task A- Quantitative Techniques-I

About the relation of inequality and poverty with crime in Mexico

Published by Sully C. Calderon Martinez and Jorge Noel Valero-Gil

Sushree Lipsita Tripathy

2012PGP099

[Pick the date]

IIM Shillong

Introduction to the Paper

This paper was published by Sully C. Calderon Martinez and Jorge Noel Valero-Gil and is taken from the Journal of International Business and Economics, 2012. The paper seeks to establish if there is significant evidence of the existence of a positive relation between crime and inequality and crime and poverty at the municipality level in Mexico, using reported crime data from the years 2000 and 2005. It makes use of two measures of crime, property and violent crime, and two measures of inequality, one for education and one for income. A huge amount of data on crime is recorded over the world, but this paper presents a technique to use it in an effective way. This knowledge will provide valuable direction to the framing of approaches for criminal apprehension, crime and disorder reduction and crime prevention.

Research Questions

* To study the relation between crime and inequality and between crime and poverty in Mexico using reported crime data from 1963 municipalities from the years 2000 and 2005

* To find out what happens to the relation between violent crime and poverty when we control for heterogeneity

* To find if there exist any other socio-demographic variables which have criminogenic effects

Insights Gained

This study employs both qualitative and quantitative data and statistical methods, and thus provides basic practical knowledge regarding the applications of business statistics. This procedure allows us to run education and income inequality cross sectional regressions. We also learnt the construction of an estimate of the Gini coefficient for inequality in education and income. We use least squares with robust variance estimates to analyze the effect of...