Citation

Patalinghug EE. Int. J. Comp. Appl. Crim. Justice 2009; 33(1): 83-95.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, American Society of Criminology's Division of International Criminology, Publisher Informa - Taylor and Francis)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

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Abstract

This study examined the link between unemployment and crime in the Philippines from the perspective of Cantor and Land‘s (1985) view that unemployment could influence crime in two opposite ways: by creating the motivation/incentive to violate the law (need for money) and by reducing opportunities to violate the law (unemployed people are more likely to spend time at home). The findings provide support for a reduction in crime linked to unemployment (reduced opportunity for crime), particularly for homicide and physical injury. On the other hand, there was no support for the link between unemployment and an increase in crime due to a greater incentive to commit crime. Although welfare that includes food stamps and unemployment insurance does not exist in the Philippines, which would be expected to increase the incentive for crime by the unemployed, Philippine society is rooted in the extended family, which emphasizes support for family members with financial needs. This system of the extended family extends to receiving financial support from family members working in other countries. The author also suggests the possibility of a methodological explanation for these findings. Witte and Tauchen (1994) have shown the limitations of using aggregate time series in determining a robust unemployment-crime link. They argue that national-level data averaged across all of the local fluctuations remove potentially useful variations and have little power for identifying causal relationships between variables. The study used crime data collected monthly by the Philippine National Police, which are classified into Index Crimes and non-Index Crimes, comparable to crime data in the Uniform Crime Reports of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Unemployment rates were obtained from the National Statistics Office, which conducts quarterly labor force surveys. Correlations were examined for individual Index offenses and unemployment rates for the years 1975-2006.