Converging crime rates among European countries? A note
Abstract
Purpose
Social change and modernization theories postulate that as countries grow they gradually move toward a condition of similarity in various spheres exhibiting similar economic and social traits. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a process of convergence in terms of criminality levels is present in the case of European countries.
Design/methodology/approach
The research question at hand is tackled through conventional s and ß-convergence methodologies and a battery of unit root tests in the case of 16 European countries over the period 1972-2012.
Findings
The findings reported, herein, are quite uniform irrespective of the empirical methodology employed to investigate the issue at hand. The result points to a process of convergence in terms of crime rates. However, this convergence process, although present and statistically traceable, is a rather gradual one as this is depicted both by the value of the β-coefficient as well as by the trend of the coefficient of variation.
Originality/value
Most of the studies in this strand of the literature focus on investigating the association between economic conditions such as unemployment and crime or on the effectiveness of crime thwarting policies. To the best of the knowledge, this is the first paper that addresses the issue of convergence in terms of crime rates in the case of European countries.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the useful comments and constructive suggestions by an anonymous referee that helped improved the paper. The usual disclaimer applies.
Citation
Kollias, C., Leventi, T. and Messis, P. (2018), "Converging crime rates among European countries? A note", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 45 No. 3, pp. 524-534. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSE-01-2017-0010
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited