PROPERTY CRIME AS A CONSEQUENCE OF ECONOMIC MISERY: DOES SOCIAL WELFARE MATTER?

Sa？etak The misery index worsened in the country and the situation has made life unbearable to the people as their economic well-being is eroded. To unravel this link between misery index and property crime, we control for social welfare and further, employed annual data on Nigeria from 1970 to 2013. Data is analyzed with the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model to test for the unidirectional relationship as the Modified Wald Test approach to Granger Causality is used to ascertain the bidirectional link. The results suggested that a long run and negative relationship exists between misery index and property in the unidirectional approach. In the bidirectional approach, misery index Granger causes property crime. Besides, the results favored the postulation of criminal motivations and thus, suggested that social welfare must be made adequate especially for the unemployed to reduce property crime as it would cushion the effect of misery index in the country