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Which Are the Causes of Criminality in Brazil? Matteo Francesco Ferroni1

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Which Are the Causes of Criminality in Brazil? Matteo Francesco Ferroni1 Which are the Causes of Criminality in Brazil? Matteo Francesco Ferroni1 September 2014 1 Il presente documento è di esclusiva pertinenza del relativo autore ed è esclusivamente riservato per l’uso espressamente consentito dall’autore medesimo, senza il cui preventivo espresso consenso scritto non può essere ulteriormente distribuito, adattato, memorizzato ovvero riprodotto, in tutto o in parte e in qualsiasi forma e tecnica. Index Page Abstract 1 1. Introduction 1 2. Crime in Brazil 4 3. Becker’s model 10 4. Explanatory variables 13 5. Data 18 6. Econometric model of criminality 25 7. Conclusion 30 References 32 Appendix 34 1. Data collection 34 Abstract The objective of this study is to better understand the determinants of criminality rate in Brazil, more specifically the determinants of homicides. I based myself on Becker’s model of criminal rational behavior. After selecting some economical and sociological variables, I run a cross sectional regression using the data of 2010 from 608 Brazilian municipalities. My main result suggests that inequality has an impact on the homicide rate while poverty does not. Furthermore, there is evidence proving that urbanization and unemployment are positively related to the homicides, whereas education is negatively related. On the other hand the age composition of the population is positively related only until a certain level. 1. Introduction Criminality is a problem that has repercussions in different fields. Firstly it is a social problem that can directly and indirectly affects the life of the population. In fact it has an impact not only on the quality and the expectation of our lives but also on decisions that we make. When we have to choose in which neighborhood to live, which school to send our children or even in which country to spend our holidays, we are affected by criminality since we are concerned by our safety. Furthermore criminality is also a political problem because to fight it the government has to participate actively reallocating public resources. Moreover, and most importantly, it is an economic problem as it is caused by some economic variables and it directly affects the development of the countries. I am presenting a research on the causes of criminality rates that will enable us to better understand and consequently address the problem. For my work I will consider Brazil. I have chosen Brazil because it is an interesting country to analyze since it is one of the biggest developing countries and criminality is one of the biggest concerns. Considering the homicide rate, Brazil has the highest one between the BRICs and it belongs to the third region, South America, with the highest homicide rate after only Central America and Southern Africa. Furthermore, given the dimension of Brazil, its administrative division allows us to have a big sample and the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) make available a big amount of data useful for this study. Most of the empirical studies on crime until now have been conducted on the US or on other developed countries. One of the main reasons is that the data is easier to collect. But this doesn’t mean that the data is non existent or not reliable enough in the developing countries, which are very important to study. In fact if we limit our studies only to the developed countries, this will not be enough to understand the reasons of criminality. We can’t expect to be able to apply correctly these results to other categories of countries, such as the developing ones. When two countries have different demographic, political and social characteristics is obvious that the criminal activities won’t be affected by the 2 same factors. Or better, even if the factors are the same, their impact on the criminality level will be different. This is why is important to not restrict our sample of countries and run the same kind of studies on other categories. Even so some studies have been made also on other countries. To go back to Brazil, one of the first studies that analyses the causes of the criminality in this country was made by De Araujo Jr. and Fajnzylber in 2001. Since then more studies have been made on Brazil. One of the most recent ones has been conducted by Sachsida et al. in 2010. These two works have in common the fact that their analysis are made by panel data regressions which use as time series variable the period between 1981 and 1995 and as cross sectional data the Brazilian states. In their researches they don’t use the same variables to explain criminality but we can still compare some of their results. They both conclude that unemployment is positively correlated to the criminal level and that the public security spending, such as the police force, is negatively correlated. On the other hand their works don’t fit with each other in determining the impact of inequality. In the work of De Araujo Jr. and Fajnzylber it seems that an increase in inequality will lead to a decrease of the criminal level, while in Sachsida’s work it will lead to the opposite result. Furthermore De Araujo Jr. and Fajnzylber conclude that an increase on the income has a negative impact on criminality and Sachsida et al. conclude that the level of urbanization has a positive impact while the poverty level seems to have none. My work will provide some evidence in support of some of these results but in some cases it will go against them. Furthermore I will introduce and use different variables from them. Besides the variables that I will use, my work is different from the previous ones for two main reasons. The first one is that the data that I will use is more recent as it is taken from the Demographic Census of 2010 of the IBGE. Since any study has been done considering the data from the last twenty years, is important to check if the patterns are the same or if they have changed for some reason. There is no any particular reason to believe that this is the case but if we think how much our society has changed and how 3 much Brazil has growth in the last two decades this is a licit doubt. Furthermore is always important to verify the results of previous studies and it would be even better to do so analyzing a different sample so we will be able to affirm if the results are still correct for a different population. The second difference is that I will use a different sample. My study will be based on the Brazilians municipalities that in 2010 had more than 50,000 inhabitants. I have made this decision to avoid taking under consideration too small municipalities where the criminality level can be easily misrepresented, as I will explain better below. In this way I will use the data from 608 out of 5,565 municipalities. Even if this means that I am analyzing only 11% of the municipalities, I’m considering 66% of the whole Brazilian population and 80% of the homicides that happened in that year. Furthermore the sample is big enough to give us results whit good statistic significance. The objective of this study is to better understand the main determining factors of criminality in Brazil, more specifically the determinants of homicides since it is considered as the most serious crime, it is the easiest to measure and is less underreported than other crimes. To do this I will base my work on the model of criminal rational behavior introduced by Gary S. Becker in 1968. I will then select some macroeconomic and sociological variables that the model suggests could have an impact on the criminality level. With the data from the Demographic Census of 2010 I will run a cross sectional regression for the 608 selected municipalities in order to identify the magnitude and the significance of the variables taken under consideration. 4 2. Crime in Brazil Is criminality a major problem in Brazil? To try to answer this question let’s consider some data about it, especially regarding homicides. In 1980 Brazil’s homicide rate was of 15 homicides per 100,000 people, in 1990 it has risen to 22.2, in 2000 to 26.8 and in 2009 it reached 27.2 homicides per 100,000 people. In thirty years Brazil’s homicide rate almost doubled. This is without doubt an alarming growth. But are these rates particularly high or are they at the same level of other countries? Thanks to the studies of the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), we can compare these rates to the other countries, and we find out that Brazil’s homicide rate is high for the international standards. The worldwide rate in 2010 has been of 6.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, which means that Brazilian’s rate is 3.9 times the global average. Even only considering Latin America it is still high. In fact it is 1.36 times the mean for Latin America. From the UN’s intentional homicide rate, Brazil results to be the 16th country out of 209 for intentional homicide rate and, excluding African and Caribbean countries, it is preceded only by Venezuela and Colombia. Stated that homicides are a major concern in Brazil, we can now try to analyze more in details how this problem appears. Homicides in Brazil affect primarily young men, like in almost every country. In 2009, 92 percent of homicides victims were men and 55 percent of them were aged between 15 and 29. If we also include the population between 30 and 39 years old, we cover 77 percent of the homicides victims.
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