Persistence in incarcerations: global comparative evidence

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess how incarcerations persist across the world. The focus is on 163 countries for the period 2010-2015. Design/methodology/approach The empirical evidence is based on generalized method of moments. In order to increase room for policy implications, the data set is decomposed into sub-samples based on income levels, religious domination, openness to the sea, regional proximity and legal origins. Findings The following main findings are established. Incarcerations are more persistent in low income, Christian-protestant and Latin American countries while comparative evidence is not feasible on the basis of landlockedness and legal origins owing to unfavorable post-estimation diagnostic tests. Justifications for the comparative advantages and relevance of findings to theory building in public economics are discussed. Practical implications First, income levels matter in the persistence of incarcerations because low-income nations vis-à-vis their high-income counterparts have less financial resources with which to prevent and deal with events like terrorism, political instability and violence that lead to incarcerations. Second, the intuition for religious domination builds on the fact that liberal societies can be more associated with incarcerations compared to conservative societies. The main theoretical contribution of this study to the literature is that the authors have built on empirical validity to provide theoretical justification as to why categorizing countries on the basis of selected fundamental characteristics determine cross-country variations in incarcerations. Such evidence is important for theory building in public economics. Originality/value It is important for policy makers to understand the persistence of incarcerations across nations because resources could be allocated to regions and countries, contingent on the relative importance of future incarceration tendencies.

The Persistence of Weapons: Global Evidence

“…The theoretical foundations are also in line with mainstream literature on incomelevel convergence, which has been documented within the premise of neoclassical growth models (Barro 1991;Barro andSala-i-Martin 1992, 1995;Baumol 1986;Mankiw, Romer, and Weil 1992). The underlying theoretical framework has been recently extended to other areas of development economics, notably: inclusive development (Asongu 2014;Mayer-Foulkes 2010); and progress in financial markets (Asongu 2013;Bruno, De Bonis, and Silvestrini 2012;Narayan, Mishra, and Narayan 2011). As argued by Narayan, Mishra, and Narayan (2011), it is unlikely that persistence and convergence can be established within a heterogeneous set of countries because idiosyncratic tendencies may be many and loom substantially.…”

“…According to the corresponding criterion, for convergence to be apparent, the absolute value of the estimated lagged endogenous variable should be between the interval of zero and one. Convergence in the context of this article is a process whereby countries with low levels in a given phenomenon or macroeconomic outcome are catching up to their counterparts with higher levels in the same phenomenon or macroeconomic outcome (Asongu 2013;Narayan, Mishra, and Narayan 2011). In other words, in the presence of convergence in weapons, countries with small stocks of weapons are catching up to their counterparts with large stocks of weapons.…”

“…the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Surveys on Crime Trends; and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (CTS). The temporal and geographical scopes are contingent on data availability constraints at the time of the study (Asongu 2018;Asongu and Acha-Anyi 2019).…”

The Sustainability of Tourism: Global Comparative Evidence

“…The magnitude of the estimated lagged value is important because it translates to how past values of tourist arrivals affect future values. Hence from a comparative standpoint, higher estimated lagged values imply that past values affect future values more proportionately.The use of the lagged outcome variable to assess persistence has been justified with contemporary literature (Asongu, 2018;Asongu & Meniago, 2018 across sub-samples. It is normal that the significance of control variables should vary across sub-samples in the light of the fact that the control variables are also contingent on these subsamples.…”

Crime and social media

“…First, a substantial part of annual global wealth is increasingly being spent by governments in the prevention and mitigation of violence, crimes, political-instability with consequent externalities (Asongu, 2018;GPI, 2016;Anderson, 2015;Asongu and Kodila-Tedika, 2017). According to the attendant policy and scholarly literature, the underlying annual global wealth spent is about 14.3 trillion USD and represents the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the following advanced countries, namely: Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK).…”