Probing Crimes, Ethnic Diversity, Institutional Quality and Economic Misery in Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan’s economy has been vulnerable due to sharp rise in crime rate, terrorism along with coexisted inflation and unemployment, so called economic misery for the last many decades.  Covering time series data from 1984 to 2014 and by using Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) techniques, study explores the above nexus. The findings reveals that economic misery, ethnic diversity has significant positive impact on crime rates and quality of institutions shows significant negative impact on crime rate, while GDP per capita has nothing to do with crime due to economic misery instead of distributional of income impact.