| Περίληψη: | The relationship between economic disparities and crime has been a subject of importance for several studies over the decades, even as far as back to the early 60s. Nevertheless, few are the studies conducted in the area of the European Union (EU). In this dissertation, we examine the impact of income inequality on crime in the state members of European Union.
In the process of doing so, data had to be collected for the European countries from two main databases, Eurostat and World Bank, concerning the period of time 2000 – 2018. The method to extract the results of the analysis was Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). The econometric model that was used takes into consideration as dependent variables property and violent crime indicators while they are calculated as rates per 100.000 population. The main independent variable that describes income inequality is the Gini index, while the remaining independent variables are the Urban population as a percentage of the total population, the GDP per capita in constant prices of 2017 and the Rule of Law ranging from approximately -2.5 to 2.5. The results indeed indicated that in the EU there is a positive correlation between income inequality and crime rates, even though noneconomic-motivated crimes were found less significant or even no significant at all, than the counterparts of property crime.
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