A economia do crime: uma abordagem a partir da Região Policial da Grande São Paulo

This paper approaches the question of criminality in the Police Region of the Great São Paulo (PRGSP), under the approach of the economics of crime. It was taken to the analysis the crimes of theft, robbery, and theft and robbery of vehicles, as well as the aggregate of these three modalities of crime, all reported to the police in that important region. The analysis was based on well known models in the fields of economics of crime and econometrics, capable to analyze the importance of a set of explanatory variables over the phenomena of criminality. For each of these crime modalities, it was estimated an offer curve, making use of the techniques of Engle and Granger to co-integrated models with mechanism of error correction. The econometric results showed that increases of income concentration and unemployment indexes, reduction of the average earnings of labor, and a change for the worse of the efficiency of police and justice explain the evolution of criminal activities in that region. The results also showed that the public actions to control crime can not left social policies on the second plane, once they actually combat the true causes of criminality, instead to repress the criminal action.