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The Socio-economic Determinants of Violent Crime in Jamaica

Social and economic factors have an impact on the state of people’s lives which in turn influence their behaviour. The key objective of this study is to determine which of these factors contribute to the rate of violent crime in Jamaica so that the Government can utilise more effective methods to curb the occurrence of violent crime. A vector autoregression (VAR) model is employed to ascertain the relationship among socio-economic variables (social expenditure as a percentage of GDP, the clear-up rate, the size of the police force) and the rate of violent crime over a 30-year period. Using innovation accounting, the causality and significance of the variables in relation to the rate of violent crime is attained. Results show that social expenditure as a percentage of GDP explains the variation in the violent crime rate by approximately 1% at the end of a 25-year period; however this impact is shown to be significant when the Granger Causality test is conducted. While social expenditure does not seem to influence the violent crime rate to a great extent, how it affects violent crime should be given consideration.