Crime-poverty nexus: an intellectual survey

Abstract

The relationship between crime rates and poverty incidence is complex and multidimensional. The number of studies confirmed that poverty leads to crime rates1–8 while on the reverse side, the causal mechanism has been observed and concluded that higher crime rates lead to poverty incidence across countries.9–13 These studies are largely discussed with different determinants of poverty and crime rates in different economic settings. These studies are on the same finding that poverty and crime interlinked with each other that affect socioeconomic and environmental factors, which influenced country’s sustained growth in the long-run. This study is one of the initiatives to assess crime-poverty nexus in the Pakistan’s context, as the economy largely faced domestic and internal violence in the form of crime rates and terrorism since last many decades.14