Brazil has experienced remarkable growth following economic restructuring programs in the 1990s. Since 1990, Brazil’s GDP-PPP has doubled, and these high levels of economic growth have been coupled with highly successful poverty and inequality reduction programs. Despite these gains, Brazil faces persistent problems, one of the most salient of which is violent crime. As such, understanding the contributing factors to violent crime is important both academically and practically. In particular, the regional variation in homicide rates poses an interesting question for researchers. Southeastern Brazil experienced rapid decline in violent crime beginning in 2003, while the northeast experienced a similarly dramatic increase. The project investigates the factors contributing to violent crime in Brazil in order to understand these phenomena, using a constructed panel dataset to analyze the dynamics of violent crime using econometric methods. The possible factors examined include inequality, unemployment, and public policy.
