Publication

While it is widely believed that the principal causes of crime are socioeconomic, the term is too broad to be unproblematically operationalized. As a result, this paper focuses more narrowly on economic factors that drive crime, in particular inequality and exclusion. This is because a wide consensus exists that South Africa’s crime problems — especially its extraordinarily high levels of violent crime — are related to, and in part caused by, the country’s equally high levels of inequality.