The economic consequences of crime in Italy

Abstract This paper employs provincial data to study the relationship between several crime typologies, namely murder, robbery, extortion and fraud, and economic output in Italy. We employ a spatial econometric approach where the spatial proximity is defined by a measure of physical distance between locations, in order to take into account possible spill-over effects. The results of the spatial estimation suggest that criminal activities, namely murder and robbery, exhibit a negative impact on Italian gross domestic product while fraud and total crime do not affect economic output and that there are beneficial spill-overs from neighbouring provinces.