Abstract:

Crime has always existed throughout the history of mankind and has negatively affected the social order. Therefore, the factors that lead to crime are investigated by criminal scientists. In this study, the economic dimension of the crime is investigated. Many macroeconomic variables, such as unemployment, wages, inflation, unclean domestic earnings per person and injustice in income distribution, have an impact on the crimes committed against property processed mostly for economic reasons. In this study, based on the way of classification of the second-level statistical regional units of Turkey (IBBS2) the objective is to determine the spatial dependence of the relationship between unemployment and crimes committed against property, using annual data from the period 2008-2014, spatial panel data analysis. In the analysis, Hausman’s test results show that the fixed-effective space panel model is the most suitable model for work, while the probability ratio test results also show that the space-autoregressive (measional delayed) model is the most suitable model for work. The empirical findings achieved by the spatial autoregressive model have shown that there is a positive spatial dependence between neighboring regions, that the border neighborhood increases the types of crime committed against property, and that unemployment has a positive impact on the crimes committed against property.