An Analysis of Global Homicide Patterns

Homicide rates, like all other crimes, historically suffer from underreporting biases and datasets lacking a wide enough range of countries. However, the UNODC’s Global Study on Homicide have made strides in complete data collections as well as analyzing homicide patterns globally. This paper takes advantage of this dataset and information source to perform a cross-country, fixed-effects regression analysis in order to determine the kinds of factors that give the best explanatory power over global homicide rates. While this paper does not succeed in a complete representation of homicide rate determinants, the fixed effects regressions do find that variables related to inequality and instability—income inequality, organized crime, and democracy—prove better explanations than other variables.