PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

An increase in the crime rate may jeopardize a country’s development and economic growth. Thus, understanding the relationship between crime and a few determinants is ,crucial in sustaining the economic growth in Malaysia. The four determinants used in this research are economic growth, population, education level, and inflation rate. The data covers the period from 1984 to 2019, and Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) modeling approaches were used in this research. The findings showed that only the population has a significant positive impact on crime rates for long-term and short-term relationships. Meanwhile, economic growth and education level have a significant long-term positive effect on the crime rate. On the other hand, the inflation rate did not significantly impact the crime rate in long-term and short-term relationships. Interestingly, it was found in the findings that the crime rate and population showed a bidirectional causal relationship indicating that the past population values are useful for a better prediction of the current crime rate and vice versa. Thus, the Malaysian government should encourage people to cooperate with the enforcement authorities to deter crime for future environmental safety effectively

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