Do Poverty and Income Inequality Influence Crimes Against Persons? Evidence from a Cross-Country Panel Analysis

Crimes against persons remain a significant global social challenge, while persistent poverty and income inequality continue to shape socio-economic conditions that may influence crime dynamics across countries. This study aims to analyse the relationship between poverty, income inequality, and crimes against persons, specifically homicide, kidnapping, and robbery, across countries using panel econometric methods. The empirical analysis is based on an unbalanced panel dataset covering up to 90 countries over the period 2000–2024, combining crime data from UNODC with socio-economic indicators from the World Bank and applying fixed-effects, random-effects, and Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML-FE) estimations. The results indicate that income inequality indicators do not demonstrate statistically significant effects on homicide rates in either linear panel models or the PPML-FE specification, with the coefficient for the Gini index remaining close to zero (β = −0.0004; p = 0.984). Similarly, kidnapping rates do not show robust associations with inequality indicators, although the share of people living below 50% of the median income displays a marginally significant negative effect in the PPML-FE model (β = −0.102; p = 0.059). In contrast, the robustness analysis reveals statistically significant relationships for robbery: higher income inequality measured by the Gini index is associated with lower robbery rates (β = −0.077; p = 0.025), while a larger income share held by the lowest 10% of the population also reduces robbery incidence (β = −0.542; p = 0.012). Additional models using the poverty headcount ratio show that poverty does not significantly affect homicide (β = 0.0036; p = 0.526), but it demonstrates a significant negative association with kidnapping (β = −0.0218; p = 0.037) and robbery rates (β = −0.0320; p < 0.001). The findings suggest that the relationship between economic deprivation and violent crime is complex and varies across different types of crimes.