THE FIGHT IN FOOD PRICES
Preliminary findings in new research due for publication in 2019 indicate a link between the relative increase in food and beer prices with levels of crime and violent behaviour in South Africa. PEARL BOSHOMANE TSOTETSI
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o say that South Africa is a country with high levels of violence is not new – the crime statistics shock us every year. It’s to be expected that our divided past would affect us but the reasons behind the nature of our society today are deeper than transgenerational trauma. While the causes of violence and the links between poverty and mental illness have been researched globally, and to an extent locally, a new paper has found that relative increases in food and beer prices can be linked to crime levels and violent behaviour in South Africa. Authored by Dr Gareth Roberts, Professor Tendai Gwatidzo and Dr Dambala Kutela in the Department of Economics, School of Economic and Business Sciences at Wits, the paper, The Effects of the Price of Food and Beer on Crime in South Africa is due to be published early in 2019. The researchers looked at the South African Police Service’s crime statistics in every province for each month between January 2008 and March 2012. They combined those with data released by Statistics South Africa of the consumer price indices of different goods and service categories in these provinces. This allowed them to estimate the impact of food and beer prices on crime. However, methodological constraints make it difficult to determine in which provinces the impact was the highest. “We can show the correlation between food prices and crime in different provinces – but correlation is not causation. What we try to do in the paper is identify the causal effect and to do that, we have to exploit differences in these prices in different provinces at different times,” says Roberts. While Roberts acknowledges that it is difficult to identify causality in applied
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“A relative increase of food prices leads to an increase in certain types of crime.”
