'Hunger Makes a Thief of Any Man': Poverty and Crime in British Colonial Asia

Weather Shocks, Agriculture, and Crime

“…In wet districts, there is a far smaller decline in yields and no evidence for an increase in crime. These results are consistent with historical accounts of increases in crime with both drought and floods in British colonial Asia (Papaioannou, 2016).…”

“…As was noted in our baseline results, there is some evidence of an increase in crime with positive rainfall shocks, which we hypothesized to be due to income losses sustained from excess rainfall or flooding (Hidalgo et al, 2010;Papaioannou, 2016). To explore this possibility further, we exploit heterogeneities in the responsiveness of different crops to excessive rainfall, and examine whether crime responds to these shocks in a stronger manner in areas in which more susceptible crops tend to be grown.…”

Weather Shocks and Agricultural Commercialization in Colonial Tropical Africa: Did Cash Crops Alleviate Social Distress?

“…The goal of this sub-section is to provide a brief overview of the most important links between climatic fluctuations and societal outcomes suggested in the literature. While some scholars dispute the evidence linking weather to conflict outcomes (Klomp & Bulte, 2013;Buhaug et al, 2014), a range of studies have found that climatic variability not only triggers conflict (Fjelde & von Uexkull, 2012;Hendrix & Salehyan, 2012;Papaioannou 2016), crime (Iyer & Topalova, 2014;Blakeslee & Fishman, 2015;Papaioannou, 2017), and fullblown civil war (Blattman & Miguel, 2010), but also processes of democratization (Brückner & Ciccone, 2011). Scholars are divided on the mechanisms that explain the 'climate-society nexus' (Almer & Boes, 2012;Buhaug, 2010), but harvest failures are found to be a prime candidate, especially in settings where people's incomes rely heavily on rain-fed farming and where small fluctuations in crop yields can have devastating effects on livelihoods (Barrios et al, 2010;Iyer & Topalova, 2014;Blakeslee & Fishman, 2015;Brückner & Ciccone, 2011;Miguel et al, 2004;Schlenker & Lobell, 2010;Papaioannou, 2017).…”

“…Recent contributions have begun to investigate different time periods (Papaioannou, 2016;Jia, 2014), employ a more fine-grained, sub-national scope (Harari et al, 2013;Raleigh & Urdal, 2007) and use more non-binary indicators as the dependent variable (Papaioannou, 2016;2017). Moreover, a number of studies have employed detailed case study analyses to uncover the key mechanisms leading from weather variability to social distress, civil unrest and political upheaval (Adano et al, 2012, Benjaminsen et al, 2012Ember et al, 2012;Witsenburg & Adano, 2009).…”

The Focus on Poverty in the Most Influential Journals in Economics: A Bibliometric Analysis of the “Blue Ribbon” Journals

“…Using data from urban U.S. counties, Kelly (2000) demonstrated that poverty and inequality are intimately connected with poverty having significant effects on property crime, but little on violent crime, whereas inequality impacts strongly on violent crime. Stimulated by these earlier contributions, multiple scholarly disciplines, including economics, developed further this stream of research; they have observed and documented that poverty and crime go hand in hand, with absolute poverty being associated with higher property crime rates and relative poverty being linked with violent crime (Papaioannou, 2017).…”