Who Fears Crime

Most extant research in the economics of crime literature has focused on explaining variations in crime rates. Public action to prevent crime, however, is often dependent on the level of concern about public security that is expressed in public perceptions surveys. The economics of crime literature has largely overlooked responses to such surveys as data sources and therefore it has not accounted for the role that public opinion might have in mobilizing public action against crime. We use a unique survey administered in 2003 in 32 Chinese cities to examine the determinants of perceptions of public security among China’s urban population. In particular, we investigate the hypothesis that urbanites’ attitudes to migrants influence their perceptions of public security. We find that individuals who have a negative perception of migrants also have a poor perception of public security. We also find that the unemployment rate, the masculinity ratio and expenditure on armed police in the city in which the individual resides, whether the individual lives in the coastal region as opposed to the central or western region and average changes in housing prices and average changes in rental prices in the city in which the individual lives are important predictors of perceptions of public security. JEL classification: D12, D60, H41