Objectives

This article explores the merits of commercially-based survey data on crime through cross-validation with established crime metrics.

Methods

Using unpublished data from 166 countries covering the period between 2006 and 2019, the article describes the geographical distribution across global regions and trends over time of three types of common crime, homicide, and organised crime. The article then explores possible determinants of the geographical distributions through regressing prevalence rates against indices of poverty, inequality, proportion of youth, presence of criminal opportunities (wealth and urbanisation), and governance/rule of law.

Results

The results show that African and Latin American countries suffer from the highest levels of various types of crime across the board, followed by countries in Asia. European, North American and Australian countries experience intermediate or relatively low levels of most types of crime. Levels of common crime have dropped or stabilized globally except in Africa where they went up. Homicides have fallen almost universally. Trends in organised crime are diverging.

Conclusions

Dimensions of governance emerged as powerful determinants of levels of all types of crime. Important determinants of common crime besides governance were poverty, inequality, and proportion of youth. To some extent changes in these same characteristics of countries were found to be correlated with changes in levels of crime over the past fifteen years. The article concludes with a discussion of the study’s limitations and suggestions for further research.

中文翻译：

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全球犯罪模式：2006-2019年来自全球166个国家的调查数据分析

目标

本文通过与既定犯罪指标的交叉验证来探索基于商业的犯罪调查数据的优点。

方法

本文使用了166个国家的2006年至2019年期间未发布的数据，描述了全球区域的地理分布以及三种常见犯罪，凶杀和有组织犯罪的时间趋势。然后，本文通过将流行率与贫穷，不平等，青年比例，存在犯罪机会（财富和城市化）以及治理/法治等指标进行回归，探索了可能的地理分布决定因素。

结果

结果表明，非洲和拉丁美洲国家遭受的各类犯罪数量最高，其次是亚洲国家。欧洲，北美和澳大利亚国家/地区在大多数类型的犯罪中处于中等或相对较低的水平。全球范围内，普通犯罪水平有所下降或趋于稳定，但非洲除外。杀人凶手几乎已经普遍下降。有组织犯罪的趋势各不相同。

结论

治理的维度已成为决定所有类型犯罪水平的有力决定因素。除治理外，普通犯罪的重要决定因素是贫困，不平等和青年比例。在一定程度上，发现这些国家的这些相同特征的变化与过去十五年来犯罪水平的变化相关。本文最后讨论了该研究的局限性，并提出了进一步研究的建议。