The poverty-crime nexus revisited: absolute poverty, relative poverty, and crime rates in 105 countries

ABSTRACT

Criminological writing on the poverty-crime nexus has suffered from a lack of engagement with academic work about the definition of poverty. Furthermore, researchers who have connected nations’ crime rates to their poverty levels have tended to use infant mortality rates (a health outcome variable) as a proxy for poverty. This article presents findings from the first study of cross-national crime differences to use measures of “absolute” poverty (% with purchasing power under $1.90 per day at 2011 prices) and “relative” poverty (% with income below 50% of the national median). Both measures correlated positively with rates of assault/mugging, stealing, homicide, and intimate partner violence against women. Relative poverty is closely connected to inequality, while absolute poverty is closely connected to low socio-economic development, so the findings are consistent with the view that economic inequality is generally criminogenic whereas modernisation is not.

KEYWORDS:

• Absolute poverty
• crime
• Gallup World Poll
• homicide
• relative poverty
• victim studies

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Jerry Hansen of Gallup Analytics for supplying the Gallup World Poll data, Anthony Lloyd for supervising the MSc dissertation the article is based on, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The OECD data are available at https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm

2. While it is conventional to refer only to other authors’ published work in a “Discussion and Conclusion”, here, in the absence of relevant published findings, the author presents his own calculations using data from the same 105 countries that featured in the “Results” section.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Dunn

Dr Andrew Dunn is a Teaching Fellow in Criminology at Bath Spa University in the UK. His current research focuses on gender inequality, socio-economic development, and WHO estimates of national levels of intimate partner violence against women. His recent articles on the definition and measurement of poverty have appeared in the Journal of Social Policy, Social Indicators Research, and Economic Affairs.