Abstract
This study examines the effect that crime victimization has on Latin American citizens’ life satisfaction. The data comes from the Americas Barometer Survey of 2014, a public opinion project that collects self-reported measures of life satisfaction. To overcome some of the methodological issues faced by previous studies, a generalized ordered logit with partial constraints is used to examine the existence of a relationship. The results reinforces the negative association between being a victim of a crime and an individual’s level of life satisfaction as found by previous studies. It also supports previous findings showing that what matters is being a direct victim of a crime rather than living in a country with high homicides rates. In both cases, the size of the relationship differs by country.
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Source: Jaitman et al. (2017). Data from UNDC
Fuente: Jaitman et al. (2017)
Fuente: Jaitman et al. (2017)
Source: Authors’ calculations based on LAPOP 2014. It corresponds to the percentage of individuals in Latin-American countries stating each category as the most serious problem faced by each country
Source: Authors’ calculations based on LAPOP 2014
Source: Authors’ calculations based on LAPOP 2014
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Notes
It is a common practice in the literature to use welfare to denote longer term happiness, but it is often used interchangeably with happiness.
This figure is built using a sample of 28,874 individuals who participated in the LAPOP survey in 2014, Fig. 1a reports the frequency of each possible answer to the question, “In your opinion, what is the most serious problem facing this country?”.
Following the World Happiness Report (2016) the following countries are among the first 50 with the highest levels of happiness (rank position in parenthesis): Costa Rica (14), Brazil (17), Mexico (21), Chile (24), Panama (25), Argentina (26), Uruguay (29), Colombia (31), Guatemala (39), El Salvador (46), Nicaragua (48).
“Individuals place themselves regarding how they feel about their life right now on an imaginary ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top, where the top represents the best possible situation and the bottom the worst possible situation. Thus, this variable ranges between 0—the worst possible situation- and 10 –the best possible situation.” (Ditella et al. 2008, p. 44).
Options for doesn’t know/doesn’t answer are also included among the list of answers.
These data, administered by the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, were freely accessed. The project does not take responsibility for any interpretation of the data.
The countries included account also for the highest participation rate in the region’s GDP.
The question on the LAPOP 2014 states, “Now, changing the subject, have you been a victim of any type of crime in the past 12 months? That is, have you been a victim of robbery, burglary, assault, fraud, blackmail, extortion, violent threats or any other type of crime in the past 12 months? (1) Yes (2) No (88) DK (98) DA”.
Notice that the effects will also depend on the values of the independent variables for which they are estimated.
The use of “marginal effect" in this section refers to the effect of a change of a given variable on the probability of declaring the highest level of life satisfaction, i.e., P(Life Satisfaction = 4).
The model left without constraints some variables, allowing their effect to vary on each category of life satisfaction. Those variables are: age squared, unemployment, number of children, race (indigenous), perception of neighborhood safety (all categories), weekly attendance at non-religious meetings and country dummies for Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. This model is estimated using the tools developed by Williams (2006). It is estimated using maximum likelihood estimators with an autofit option set at the 1% level. This command sets the level of confidence at which the constraints previously mentioned are imposed. The estimation consisted of 24,918 observations, the hypothesis of joint non-significance is rejected at a 99% level of confidence, and the Pseudo R2 is 0.0637. The estimation was robust to account for possible heteroscedasticity caused, for instance, by correlation among country groups. (Wooldridge 2010).
Column (3) includes country’s GDP and shows that individuals living in countries with higher levels of income experience higher probabilities of being in the maximum level of life satisfaction. As explained before, this could be suffering from omitted variable bias by not allowing controlling for other specific country’s characteristics.
The interaction term is not shown explicitly in Table 3, because the marginal effect of the interaction is included in the marginal effect of each variable, i.e., intentional homicides and victim.
Column (3) includes country’s GDP and shows that individuals living in countries with higher levels of income experience higher probabilities of being in the maximum level of life satisfaction. As explained before, this could be suffering from omitted variable bias by not allowing to control for other specific country’s characteristics.
Marginal effects for the average woman and man from each country were included in the document; however, after the variable for gender was not found to be statistically significant, the marginal effects for the average man and woman only have negligible differences.
Theft is disproportionately common in Latin America, in less than one decade, the robbery rates in many LAC countries have dramatically increased and on average, six out of ten robberies in the region are violent.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and its major supporters (the United States Agency for International Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Vanderbilt University) for making the data available.
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Appendix
See Table 4.
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Ortega Londoño, C., Gómez Mesa, D., Cardona-Sosa, L. et al. Happiness and Victimization in Latin America. J Happiness Stud 20, 935–954 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-9981-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-9981-3