Unemployment and Crime Rate Nexus: An Empirical Evidence from Nigeria

Abstract

Unemployment undoubtedly results in inadequate necessities in the immediate family, which cascades into poverty in the community and the economy as a whole. To this end, so many Nigerians have lost trust in the government. Therefore, Nigeria's high crime rate has ultimately been caused by the country's high unemployment rate. The purpose of this study is to ascertain how unemployment has affected Nigeria's crime rate spanning from 1990 to 2020. The study used secondary data time series sourced from the World Development Indicator. The study used the Augmented Dickey Fuller test to show variable stationarity, the ARDL Bound test was equally used to assess the long run nexus between the variables, and the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) was adopted as an estimating technique to analysis the data of the study. The outcome results reveals that in Nigeria, a high percentage of unemployment induced a high rate of crime, with a 1% rise in unemployment resulting in a 0.0830 increase in crime rate in Nigeria. To this end, the study concludes with the following policy recommendations: that government should endeavour to create jobs in order to reduce unemployment, and also government should create enabling environment in which people are encouraged to learn hand work, ready to become an entrepreneurs on their own and the like. More so, government should make sure whosoever proven guilty of a crime should face decisive penalties that commensurate the offence.