Journal of Economics and Development Studies

Crime Dependency on Punishment: Evidence on Economic Growth in Nigeria
Adenuga Fabian Adekoya; Nor Azam Abdul Razak

Abstract
This work examines the link between punishment and economic growth. To show how punishment influences the Nigerian economy, crime was interacted with punishment and its impact on economic growth is examined. Besides, the relations among crime, punishment, and economic growth were explained in the context of the rational choice theory discussed in Becker (1968). In testing the theory’s proposition, data from 1970 to 2013 was analysed with the autoregressive distributed lag model of Pesaran (2001). Moreover, the results indicate that crime is harmful to economic growth and punishment improved economic growth in short run. Also, the crime dependency on punishment shows a negative value of 0.582 on economic growth. The negativity of crime dependency on punishment shows that punishment is not efficient in promoting economic growth, but rather a social loss to the economy through the occurrence of crime in Nigeria. This study suggests a reform in legal and enforcement systems in the country for a reduction in social loss coming from punishment due to crime occurrence. The improvement in the legal system would reduce the congestion of prison inmates, and thus save the cost of keeping suspects in the prison without trials for long.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/jeds.v4n2a17