The Irish National Accounts are below
http://www.cso.ie/statistics/nationalacc.htm
The estimates for public expenditure are here
http://www.finance.gov.ie/ViewDoc.asp?DocId=-1&CatID=13&m=f
If you look around the CSO websites, you can get a rough idea of how much money and people are in the legal part of the economy. However, there is a lot less known about the hidden part of the economy.
In general, there has been little influence of economics on the debate in crime in Ireland with law and sociology being the dominant disciplines in the field along with psychology. This might make sense but there is still a big gap in our understanding of the economic aspects of criminal markets and too few papers being circulated on the topic. Below are just some random links that might stimulate someone thinking of potential topics for next year.
Steven Levitt's homepage contains downloadable copies of his papers that offer several methodologies for examining illicit markets.
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/home.html
The publications of the UCD Institute of Criminology are below and there is much useful data here.
http://www.ucd.ie/criminol/Publications.htm
http://www.esr.ie/Vol34_3OSullivan.pdf
The National Crime Council offer a literature list
http://www.irlgov.ie/crimecouncil/research_cri.html
The Irish Crime Figures can be found here
http://www.garda.ie/annreport.html
A review of the economics of crime is given below
http://ideas.repec.org/h/eee/labchp/3-52.html
A number of topics are relevant in terms of economics of crime in Ireland that we now little about.
Drug Consumption is detailed in a number of descriptive works such as the one below.
“NACD and DAIRU (2003) Drug use in Ireland and Northern Ireland: First results from the 2002–2003 drug prevalence study. Bulletin 1. Dublin: National Advisory Committee on Drugs (NACD) and Drug and Alcohol Information and Research Unit, (DAIRU).”
http://www.nacd.ie/publications/documents/Bulletin1CIFinal.pdf
http://www.irlgov.ie/crimecouncil/research_dru.html
Prostitution: Several recent economics papers have outlined theories of prostitution.
http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jpolec/v110y2002i1p181-214.html
http://ideas.repec.org/p/rdg/emxxdp/em-dp2004-13.html
In terms of economic crimes:
Fuel Smuggling is widely discussed in the media.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/1219/northcrime.html?rss
Burglary in Ireland is analysed in the following working paper by Denny et al
http://www.ucd.ie/geary/publications/2004/crime.pdf
Crime Gangs are widely discussed in the popular media and in a number of books. Levitt's work on this is widely known.
6 comments:
My feeling is that the problems in measuring crime are horrendous.Maybe not with some crimes like murder but with white collar crime for example. Of course there are crimes against taste too like a certain person's shirts.
There are interesting statistical issues about how one might infer the size of the black economy. This "dark matter" problem occurs in lots of contexts for example assessing the extent of publication bias in clinical trials or in war assessing the size of the enemy's strength from captured weapons etc [the Germans conveniently had serial numbers on their V2 rockets which made it easier as the Allies advanced east]. On the whole I would prefer to just analyze good data.
that's partly what's interesting about the economics of crime - it requires a lot of thought in constructing solid ways of testing hypotheses. the recent paper that showed that the stock prices of certain gun companies went up when guns were made illegal in some of their markets is one methodology. shapiro's paper on estimating the effects of being put in to harsh prisons on recidivism is another. my problem in the irish case is that there are clear welfare effects of crime that dont end up in economic debates.
The oakland police have begun to map crimes which occur in cerain areas: crimespotting
A site where victims, (or self-defeating criminals), can post up what type of crimes occcurred, in certain areas, at which times, may be useful. This could be superimposed on geographic visualisations of actual crime data to try and identify some of the dark-matter, or at least it would be a useful alternative tourist map.
there's a problem with the crimespotting link, the site's available here if anyone is interested in seeing what computer literate police can do:
http://oakland.crimespotting.org
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