Inflation and Cross-National Homicide: Assessing Nonlinear and Moderation Effects Across 65 Countries, 1965–2015

• Date: 01 June 2021
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Douglas B. Weiss,Alexander Testa,Mateus Rennó Santos
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567720981624
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Inflation and Cross-National

Homicide: Assessing Nonlinear

and Moderation Effects Across

65 Countries, 1965–2015

Mateus Renn ´

o Santos

1

, Alexander Testa

2

,

and Douglas B. Weiss

3

Abstract

Criminologists have long speculated that economic conditions play a role in driving crime trends.

Emerging research finds that inflation rates are associated with crime rates both within the United

States and cross-nationally. Inflation is hypothesized to increase crime by incentivizing illegal markets

and organized criminal activity and by reducing the legitimacy of social institutions. Existing research

on the association between inflation and homicide rates has been limited to single-country studies or

multicountry studies consisting of developed countries only. Moreover, there has been limited

attention to the potential complexity of this relationship, including whether it is nonlinear, as crime

rates may only increase after a certain threshold of inflation is reached, and whether the crimino-

genic impact of inflation may be moderated by socioeconomic development, as developing countries

are anticipated to be more adversely impacted by the criminogenic influence of inflation. Drawing on

a sample of 65 economically diverse countries from 1965 to 2015, we find a positive direct rela-

tionship between inflation and homicide rates, although we do not find evidence that this association

is nonlinear. Finally, contrary to expectation, we find that the inflation–homicide relationship is most

impactful in countries with higher levels of development. We discuss these findings in the context of

cross-national predictors of crime.

Keywords

homicide trends, inflation, development, cross-national criminology

Social scientists havelong theorized that economic conditionssuch as unemployment rates, depri-

vation, businesscycles, consumer sentiment, and economic growth play a role in driving crime trends

(Arvanites & Defina, 2006; Bushway, 2011; Bushway et al., 2012; Chiricos, 1987; Rosenfeld &

Fornango,2007; Rosenfeld & Messner,2013). Macro-levelresearch has generallyfound mixed support

1

University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

2

The University of Texas at San Antonio, TX, USA

3

California State University San Bernardino, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Mateus Renn´

o Santos, Universityof South Florida, 4202 E. FowlerAvenue, SOC 107, Tampa, FL 33620,USA.

Email: rennosantos@usf.edu

International CriminalJustice Review

2021, Vol. 31(2) 122-139

ª2021 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1057567720981624

journals.sagepub.com/home/icj

for the relationship between these economic indicators and crime rates. In recent years, Rosenfeld

(2014, 2018) has called attention to the role of inflation (i.e., the decrease in purchasing power of a

nation’s currency) as an understudied economic indicator that may serve as a driving force behind

crime trends(see also Rosenfeld & Levin, 2016; Rosenfeldet al., 2019). While some researchprovides

support for the proposition that increasinginflation corresponds with risingcrime, the research on this

topic remains limited and has been characterized as “small, scattered, theoretically underdeveloped,

and limited to the United States” (Rosenfeld, 2014, p. 342). In his 2017 Sutherland Address to the

American Society of Criminology, Rosenfeld (2018) called for further research into the relationship

between inflation and crime, noting that the extant literature “is not a large body of research, and

inflation is generally included as a control variable without much theoretical development” (p. 11).

While several studies have advanced our understanding of the macro-level relationship between

inflation and crime, research on this relationship remains limited in four substantive ways. First,

existing research has largely focused on the relationship between inflation and acquisitive crime.

However, in recent decades, a growing body of research has emerged that aims to explain cross-

national variation in homicide rates, yet few studies assess whether inflation influences levels of

homicide (Rosenfeld, 2014). Indeed, the dearth of attention to the role of inflation is demonstrated

by the fact that recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the cross-national homicide literature

do not list inflation as a correlate of homicide rates (see Nivette, 2011; Trent & Pridemore, 2012).

Second, current cross-national research on the relati onship between inflation and homicide has

continued to focus primarily on the United States and other wealthy, Western democracies that

have experienced relatively low inflation rates over rece nt decades. In contrast, less developed

countries often experience high inflation, greater economic deprivation, and higher homicide rates

(Ha et al., 2019; Roncaglia de Carvalho et al., 2018; United Nations [UN] Office on Drugs and

Crime, 2019). Given research showing that homicide trends between Western and non-Western

countries tend to follow divergent paths (Weiss et al., 2016), this raises important questions regard-

ing the extent to which the findings from these studies are generalizable.

Third, existing cross-national research on inflation and homicide typically covers time frames

since the 1980s (see Rosenfeld, 2014; Tuttle, 2018), which omits key decades of the 1960s and

1970s that witnessed both higher global inflation (Ciccarelli & Majon, 2010) and higher global

homicide rates (LaFree et al., 2015). Hence, extant research has not investigated the link between

inflation and homicide rates during periods of dramatic rises and more extreme values in both

phenomena. Finally, prior work has largely focused on exploring a direct, linear relationship

between inflation and homicide despite Rosenfeld’s (2014) proposition that the relationship between

inflation and crime may be (1) nonlinear, such that crime rates only begin to increase after a certain

threshold of inflation is reached, or (2) moderated by other economic indicators such as economic

development or income levels, which may mitigate the criminogenic influences of inflation.

The current study addresses these gaps in the literature on the relationship between inflation and

cross-national homicide rates by (1) investigating the direct association between inflation and

homicide rates in a large, diverse sample of both developed and developing countries, over a nearly

5-decade period since 1965, (2) assessing whether the relationship between inflation and homicide is

nonlinear, and (3) exploring whether economic development moderates any relationship between

inflation and homicide.

Literature Review

Inflation and Crime: A Direct Association

Rosenfeld (2014, 2018) posited several reasons why higher inflation should result in increased

crime. First, in times of high inflation, there will be a general decline of confidence in the legitimacy

Santos et al. 123