Does the Evidence on Corruption Depend on how it is measured? Results from a Cross Country Study on Micro Data sets

This study compares the evidence on corruption between alternative data sets. These include the Corruption Perceptions Indices (CPI) that are conventionally used and the micro data sets from the International Crime Victim Surveys (ICVS) and the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) that have been used in recent applications. While a comparison between the evidence from the CPI and WBES constitutes a comparison of perception versus reality, the comparison of evidence from ICVS and WBES can be construed as a comparison of individual with business corruption. The study finds several similarities and differences between the pictures on corruption yielded by the alternative data sets. For example, while in case of low income countries, perception of business corruption seems to be worse than that based on firms’ actual experience of doing business there, the reverse is true for high income countries. The magnitude of individual corruption is consistently lower than that of business corruption, with the gap between the two forms of corruption closing only for high income countries. As a country develops and commercial transactions increase, the mix of corruption changes in favour of business corruption. While the study finds evidence of a negative association between per capita GNP and corruption rates, none of the three data sets provides any evidence of negative association between growth and corruption rates. The study also finds that while improvement in human development indicators such as literacy are effective instruments in controlling individual corruption, the strengthening of institutions such as the legal system and the regulatory mechanism are likely to be more effective in combating business corruption. The strengthening of trust, whether via improved literacy and development of social networks or via a strong legal system, and an effective and transparent regulatory mechanism is the key to combating both forms of corruption. A methodological contribution of this study is the combination of the information of the characteristics of the respondent with the country level indicators in analysing the determinants of corruption. A significant difference between the two forms of corruption is that, after controlling for the respondent’s attributes and the country indicators, while individual corruption showed an increase over time, this was not the case with business corruption. The importance of introducing the country effects is seen from the sign reversal of the time coefficient estimate that occurs in case of both individual and business corruption once we control for the effects of the country of residence of the respondent. The overall message of this study is that the authorities need to distinguish between different forms of corruption in devising policy intervention. As the mix of individual and business corruption changes with economic development, so should the mix of policy instruments in tackling corruption. The results also underline the need to undertake more studies that investigate the sensitivity of the evidence on corruption to alternative data sets.Business Corruption, Kernel density graphs, Social Network, Human Development Indicator, Regulatory Mechanism

"Can Robbery and Other Theft Help Explain the Textbook Currency-demand Puzzle? Two Dreadful Models of Money Demand with an Endogenous Probability of Crime"

This paper attempts to explain one version of an empirical puzzle noted by Mankiw (2003): a Baumol-Tobin inventory-theoretic money demand equation predicts that the average U.S. adult should have held approximately $551.05 in currency and coin in 1995, while data show an average of$100. The models in this paper help explain this discrepancy using two assumptions: (1) the probabilities of being robbed or pick-pocketed, or having a purse snatched, depend on the amount of cash held; and (2) there are costs of being robbed other than loss of cash, such as injury, medical bills, lost time at work, and trauma. Two models are presented: a dynamic, stochastic model with both instantaneous and decaying noncash costs of robbery, and a revised version of the inventory-theoretic model that includes one-period noncash costs. The former model yields an easily interpreted first-order condition for money demand involving various marginal costs and benefits of holding cash. The latter model gives quantitative solutions for money demand that come much closer to matching the 1995 data--$75.98 for one plausible set of parameters. This figure implies that consumers held approximately$96 billion less cash in May 1995 than they would have in a world without crime. The modified Baumol-Tobin model predicts a large increase in household money demand in 2005, mostly due to reduced crime rates.

Participatory Evaluation of the Tribal Victim Assistance Programs at the Lummi Nation and Passamaquoddy Tribe

The high rate of crime in American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities and/or against AI/AN people reflected in numerous studies in the last three decades, demonstrates the need for victim assistance programs in Indian Country to help victims cope with and heal from violent crime (Wolk 1982; Allen 1985; Sacred Shawl Women’s Society, no date; McIntire 1988; DeBruyn, Lujan & May 1995; Norton & Manson 1995; Fairchild et. al 1998; Greenfield & Smith 1999; Alba, Zieseniss, et al 2003; Perry 2004). The U.S. Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) became aware of the lack of resources available to AI/AN crime victims living on Indian lands. OVC, acknowledging the intense and extensive need for culturally relevant resources on reservations, established the Victim Assistance in Indian Country (VAIC) Discretionary Program in 1988, which later became the Tribal Victim Assistance Program (TVA). OVC initiated this program to establish “on-reservation” victim assistance programs that would provide permanent, accessible, and responsive victim assistance services on tribal lands. Recognizing the need for evaluation of promising victim services programs operating in Indian Country, OVC, in collaboration with the USDOJ National Institute of Justice (NIJ) supported an evaluation of two TVA programs—the Lummi Victims of Crime (LVOC) Program in Washington and the Passamaquoddy Tribal Victim Outreach Advocate (TVOA) Program in Maine. This report summarizes the results of the participatory evaluation conducted at these two sites

Crime, Corruption and Institutions

This paper explores the link between crime and corruption, compares their magnitudes, determinants and their effects on growth rates. The study uses a large cross country data set containing individual responses to questions on crime and corruption along with information on the respondents’ characteristics. This data set is supplemented by country level indicators from a variety of sources on a range of macro variables and on institutions in the respondent’s country of residence. A methodological contribution of this study is the estimation of an ordered probit model based on outcomes defined as combinations of crime and bribe victimisation. The principal results include the evidence that while a male is more likely to be a corruption victim, a female is more exposed to crime, especially, serious crime. Older individuals and those living in the smaller towns and cities are less exposed to crime and corruption due presumably to their ability to form informal networks that act as protective mechanisms. With increasing levels of income and education, an individual is more likely to report both crime and bribe victimisation. A crime victim is more likely than a non victim to report receiving demands for a bribe. The results suggest that variables such as inequality, unemployment rate and population size have a strong effect on the country’s crime and corruption statistics though the sign and significance of the country effects are not always robust. However, the paper does provide robust evidence that a stronger legal system and a happier society result in a reduction in both crime and corruption. While the study finds that both crime and corruption rates decline as a country becomes more affluent, as measured by its per capita GNP at PPP, there is no evidence of a strong and uniformly negative impact of either crime or corruption on a country’s growth rate. There is limited OLS based evidence of a non linear relationship between growth and corruption rates, though the significance of the corruption effect on growth disappears on the use of IV estimation. The paper also provides evidence that there has been a decline in both crime and corruption during the latter half of the 1990s. This is true even after controlling for the individual and country characteristics.Crime Victimisation, Institutions, Happiness, Ordered Probit, Rule of Law.

Technologies for 3D Heterogeneous Integration

3D-Integration is a promising technology towards higher interconnect densities and shorter wiring lengths between multiple chip stacks, thus achieving a very high performance level combined with low power consumption. This technology also offers the possibility to build up systems with high complexity just by combining devices of different technologies. For ultra thin silicon is the base of this integration technology, the fundamental processing steps will be described, as well as appropriate handling concepts. Three main concepts for 3D integration have been developed at IZM. The approach with the greatest flexibility called Inter Chip Via - Solid Liquid Interdiffusion (ICV-SLID) is introduced. This is a chip-to-wafer stacking technology which combines the advantages of the Inter Chip Via (ICV) process and the solid-liquid-interdiffusion technique (SLID) of copper and tin. The fully modular ICV-SLID concept allows the formation of multiple device stacks. A test chip was designed and the total process sequence of the ICV-SLID technology for the realization of a three-layer chip-to-wafer stack was demonstrated. The proposed wafer-level 3D integration concept has the potential for low cost fabrication of multi-layer high-performance 3D-SoCs and is well suited as a replacement for embedded technologies based on monolithic integration. To address yield issues a wafer-level chip-scale handling is presented as well, to select known-good dies and work on them with wafer-level process sequences before joining them to integrated stacks.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association (http://irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/16838

Judicature

The central issues that should be answered by the criminal statistic system pertain to the extent, structure and development of crime rates, the decisions of authorities for prosecution and sanctioning, the amount and type of imposed criminal sanctions, the enforcement of sanctions and the amount of reconviction after sanctioning. In this respect the German criminal statistic system has many deficits. Therefore it is necessary to supplement the existing statistics through periodical crime and victimisation surveys, to supplement the prison statistics and to implement statistics regarding suspected persons in the preliminary proceedings of public prosecutors, the enforcement of criminal sanctions as well as periodic reconviction statistic. But a comprehensive optimisation of the criminal statistics system requires the establishment of a statistical data base in which all data of the police crime statistics and all criminological relevant judicial decisions are recorded with pseudonymised individual data and subsequently linked with each other. This statistical data base will solve the problems of the current German crime statistics and will offer a basis for the implementation of new regular federal statistics, in particular with regard to the execution of a sentence and recidivism as well as the implementation of case-flow statistics and cohort studies.case-flow statistics, cohort studies, conviction statistics, crime, sanctions, criminal, police crime statistics, prison statistics, probation service statistics, recidivism, reconviction statistic, statistics of criminal courts, statistics of the public prosecution offices, victimisation survey

Crime, Poverty and Police Corruption in Developing Countries

Crime and the fear of being hit by crime and small-scale violence are key economic and social problems in most developing countries, not least felt strongly by the poor. Extensive corruption in the police, experienced or perceived, contributes seriously to the problem. A key question raised in the paper is: How is police corruption linked to the wider processes of development - including crime, violence and poverty? The paper examines (i) how and why corruption may arise in the daily routines of the police and whether it may have impacts on crime rates; (ii) empirical indications of whether the police may be more corrupt than other groups of public officials; (iii) how and why police corruption may vary across countries; and (iv) the wider impacts of police corruption on developmentCorruption Crime Police Poverty JEL classification: D73, K42, O17

Face tracking using a hyperbolic catadioptric omnidirectional system

In the first part of this paper, we present a brief review on catadioptric omnidirectional systems. The special case of the hyperbolic omnidirectional system is analysed in depth. The literature shows that a hyperboloidal mirror has two clear advantages over alternative geometries. Firstly, a hyperboloidal mirror has a single projection centre [1]. Secondly, the image resolution is uniformly distributed along the mirror’s radius [2]. In the second part of this paper we show empirical results for the detection and tracking of faces from the omnidirectional images using Viola-Jones method. Both panoramic and perspective projections, extracted from the omnidirectional image, were used for that purpose. The omnidirectional image size was 480x480 pixels, in greyscale. The tracking method used regions of interest (ROIs) set as the result of the detections of faces from a panoramic projection of the image. In order to avoid losing or duplicating detections, the panoramic projection was extended horizontally. Duplications were eliminated based on the ROIs established by previous detections. After a confirmed detection, faces were tracked from perspective projections (which are called virtual cameras), each one associated with a particular face. The zoom, pan and tilt of each virtual camera was determined by the ROIs previously computed on the panoramic image. The results show that, when using a careful combination of the two projections, good frame rates can be achieved in the task of tracking faces reliably