Journal of African Economies, Volume 12, Number 4, 625-671
Journal of African Economies 12(4), © Centre for the Study of African Economies 2003; all rights reserved
Crime, Isolation and Law Enforcement
a University of Oxford and b Cornell University
This paper investigates the relationship between criminal activity and geographical isolation. Using data from Madagascar, we show that, after we control for population composition and risk factors, crime increases with distance from urban centres and, with few exceptions, decreases with population density. In Madagascar, crime and insecurity are associated with isolation, not urbanisation. This relationship is not driven by placement of law enforcement personnel which is shown to track crime but fails to reduce feelings of insecurity in the population. Other risk factors have effects similar to those discussed in the literature on developed countries. We find a positive association between crime and the presence of law enforcement personnel, probably due to reporting bias. Law enforcement personnel helps solve crime but appears unable to prevent it.
1 We thank Bart Minten, Eliane Ralison and Lalaina Randrianarison for their assistance in collecting and cleaning the commune data. We are grateful to Tony Addison, Chris Barrett, Berk Ozler and Bart Minten for comments. We also thank Berk for graciously sharing his data on poverty and inequality in Madagascar with us. We received comments from the participants to the Oxford WIDER conference on spatial inequality in Africa, from conference participants at NEUDC, and from seminar participants at the University of Essex, the University of Aarhus and the University of Bonn. The support of WIDER and of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged. The work was part of the programme of the ESRC Global Poverty Research Group.