Unemployment and crime: the role of apprehension

An increase in the unemployment rate decreases the opportunity cost of crime and increases the crime rate according to standard microeconomics models. However, a large body of empirical research has shown that an increase in unemployment may increase or decrease crime. By incorporating the return to crime into standard economic models, this paper shows that an increase in unemployment, as in recessions, decreases the opportunity cost of crime and the return to crime as well. As a result, the effect of unemployment on crime is ambiguous and depends on the apprehension rate. An increase in the unemployment rate tends to decrease the crime rate at lower apprehension rates, but to increase it at higher apprehension rates. An increase in the generosity of unemployment insurance benefits does not necessarily reduce the crime rate, and the effect of more generous unemployment insurance on crime depends again on the apprehension rate.     

Macro development planning in tropical Africa: Technocratic and non‐technocratic causes of failure

Based on the targets given in the development plans and the national income data of twenty‐two tropical Africa countries in the late 1960s, this paper finds a wide consensus among the planners on the structural determinants of the macro variables selected as plan targets, so that difference in targets can be explained largely by the different values assumed by these determinants in the sample countries. The implementation record was poor, and may be traced in part to a domino effect inherent in the recursive structure of target selection. The analysis of the causes of implementation failure shows that most of the causes lie outside of the competence of the planners. Alternative methods to calculate plan targets are not likely to meet with superior fulfilment results.     

Peasant and state in Mozambique

Merle Bowen's study focuses on the evolution of the ‘middle peasantry’ in both colonial and postcolonial Mozambique. In doing so, she successfully challenges long‐standing, if highly problematic, notions that the Mozambican economy consists of a ‘traditional’, subsistence‐oriented peasant sector with only nominal links to ‘modern’ forms of agriculture, the urban areas, and regional and international markets. At the same time, she usefully illuminates continuities in colonial and post‐independence agrarian policies and shows the ways in which the experience of smallholder agricultural co‐operatives under the Portuguese shaped the peasantry's perceptions of, and responses to, collective agriculture under Frelimo. However, the evidence in Bowen's case study does not necessarily sustain her central thesis that the post‐independence state, like its colonial predecessor, was ‘anti‐peasant’. This is one of several criticisms made of Bowen's text.

The State Against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique, by Merle L. Bowen, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp.xiv + 256. US$65 (hardback); $19.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 8139 1910 X and 1917 7.