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ABSTRACT
This paper deals with the spatial analysis of crime in 2016 across the 113 NUTS 3 (Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics) regions of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia (known as the V4, i.e. Visegrad 4, countries). The analysis is based on a total number of crimes per 1000 persons and includes conduction of an exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and spatial econometric modelling. Both the box plot and box map of the distribution of the crime are presented. To investigate the spatial effects, the global Moran's I statistic together with the Moran scatterplot were employed. The presence of statistically significant positive spatial autocorrelation (based on queen case contiguity weight matrix) was confirmed. The local indicators of spatial association (LISA) were used to identify the local clusters. Since the statistically significant high-high clusters were confirmed for the 7 Hungarian regions, the low-low clusters occur across the 18 regions of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. The spatial outliers are represented by 2 Polish regions. Finally, the spatial econometric models were employed to assess the impact of location as well as of some economic and demographic indicators (GDP per capita, rate of employed persons and population density) on crimes in concrete region.
Keywords: Crime, Regions, Spatial econometric analysis, V4 countries
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1. INTRODUCTION
The increasing development of spatial data analysis and spatial econometric modelling has encouraged researchers from different areas (criminology, economy, psychology and sociology) to deal with place-based theories of crime as well as with analysis of some socio-economic crime determinants. As pointed out by Messner et al. (1999), Anselin et al. (2000) and Ratcliffe (2010), the pioneering work in research on crime and place was presented by social ecologists in France during the middle of the 19th century followed by some studies of the Chicago School in the early 20th century. Nowadays it exists a broad range of studies analysing crime from different points of view using different approaches. Becker (1968) provided the economic analysis of crime and punishment based on costs of crime to society in order to determine optimal policies to combat illegal behaviour. The central role of place in crime determination was stressed by the routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979), by...