09.03.10 Crime, Police Corruption and Development
Evidence from Victimization Data
NUPI-notat 772 | 53 sider.
Recently economists have begun to investigate a number of institutional conditions for growth. One question raised is how the degree of security of persons and property may impact economic development and human welfare. Based on different indexes, the importance of the degree of security is confirmed for growth and for investment in human and physical capital. Other studies had showed that corruption has a negative impact on growth.The purpose of this paper is to explore whether some specific sets of criminal actions that have impact on the security of property and persons and the behaviourally related police corruption may have significant impact on the long run economic development.
>> Summary
Recently economists have begun to study various aspects of public sector institutions (with their behavioral neighborhoods) and their effects on the long run economic development. Degrees of corruption, rule of law and protection of property rights have all apparently significant economic impact. These results are all based on the construction of indicators for these difficult-to-observe explanatory variable complexes. In most cases the indicators applied have been developed for most countries and have on the one hand ‘nice’ statistical properties when embedded in regression equations, but on the other hand are conceptually fuzzy with unclear relationships to basic observations. In this paper we go through many of the same relationships, but based on international efforts to collect questionnaire information about citizens’ experience with crime and police corruption. This information is more conceptually distinct and likely to be more closely related to relevant experience, but proves on the other hand less amenable to econometric analysis. Despite the latter weakness we have found it worthwhile to pursue it in order to complement the indicator-based approaches.
Fulltekst
|
Hele publikasjonslisten