The Socioeconomic Covariates of Violent and Property Crime Rates in Azerbaijan

Abstract

The majority of the studies exploring the relationship between socioeconomic factors and crime levels are confined to major industrialized nations. As a post-Soviet, transitional economy with a predominantly Muslim population, Azerbaijan provides a different setting to explore how socioeconomic indicators affect police-recorded violent and property crime levels across cities and districts. This study finds a positive relationship between GRP per capita, the proportion of pupils admitted to university and population size property crime levels. The relationship was linear in all cases. The geographical units with more social benefit (pensions, disability, and family care) recipients had lower acquisitive crime levels, though the significance was marginal. The higher the number of targeted social assistance recipients for poverty alleviation is, the higher the rate of violent crime is, which differs from the findings of similar previous studies. Overall, socioeconomic predictors were significantly better in explaining variations for offences against the property (r=.481) than violent crimes (r=.073). These findings suggest that different crime types are better explained by different economic indicators in the Azerbaijani context. Furthermore, the study shows that most of the covariates function in ways which are observed in the societies covered by the literature.