Relative deprivation or absolute deprivation? Empirical evidence of criminal crimes in China

ABSTRACT

Based on national time series data from 1990 to 2020 in China, the study quantified the index and analyzed the relationship among criminal cases, relative deprivation, and absolute deprivation by using a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model. The results showed that the change in absolute deprivation had no significant influence on overall criminal cases, while the expansion of relative deprivation promoted an increase in criminal cases. Meanwhile, relative deprivation and absolute deprivation have disparate effects on different types of criminal cases. On the one hand, both absolute deprivation and relative deprivation have a positive effect on violent crimes. On the other hand, the impact of absolute deprivation on property crimes is not significant. Due to the large proportion of property crimes in the total criminal cases, the reduction of absolute deprivation has a limited inhibiting effect on total criminal offenses in China’s current situation.

KEYWORDS:

• Absolute deprivation
• relative deprivation
• poverty
• inequality
• criminal crimes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author: [email protected], upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Guanzi were a kind of promissory note used during the Song period (475 BC-221 BC). (http: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Terms/guanzi.html).

2 The less significant figure has been omitted here, and only explain the implications of the empirical results.

3 According to Fajnzylber et al. (2002b), although the essence of robbery was to obtain the victim’s property for the purpose, violence, coercion and other methods were usually used by the criminals, and caused physical or psychological trauma to the victim. Therefore, robbery is classified into both violent crime and property crime in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Shaanxi Province social science major theory and practical issues research annual project [2022ND237]; Youth Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72004175].