Serious Crime in Trinidad and Tobago: An Empirical Analysis Using Time-Series Data Between 1970-2007

This paper uses time-series data from Trinidad and Tobago and tests for the existence of a long-run cointegration relationship among serious crime, clearance rate and various socio-economic indicators. The cointegration analysis provides strong evidence of the existence of a long-run model, with the normalised coefficients showing a negative effect of the clearance rate, the percentage of females in the labour force and the percentage of the labour force with tertiary education on serious crime, with the sole exception being the unemployment rate which is found to exert a positive effect.