Crime Costs to the Public in Hong Kong

The cost of crime to the public, as a public concern, requires an estimation pertinent to the context, considering substantial contextual variation. Meanwhile, the estimation needs to address issues about feasibility and validity. To address the issues, the present study exemplifies the estimation w...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social indicators research 2021-08, Vol.157 (1), p.283-296
Main Authors: Cheung, Chau-kiu, Chui, Wing Hong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cost estimates
Costs
Crime
Crime prevention
Criminal justice
Economic theory
Estimation
Feasibility
Human Geography
Judicial system
Microeconomics
Original Research
Professionals
Public concern
Public Health
Public interest
Quality of Life Research
Rehabilitation
Social Sciences
Sociology
Telephone surveys
Willingness to pay
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The cost of crime to the public, as a public concern, requires an estimation pertinent to the context, considering substantial contextual variation. Meanwhile, the estimation needs to address issues about feasibility and validity. To address the issues, the present study exemplifies the estimation with both official accounting and tripartite willingness-to-pay approaches. The tripartite approach combines the cost components of rehabilitation, criminal justice and prevention due to crime. This approach relied on telephone surveys of 1321 adult residents among the public and 91 professionals dealing with crime in the Chinese metropolis of Hong Kong. Results showed that the public crime cost estimates were $8343 from accounting and US$7466 and US$11,786 from the surveys of public and professionals respectively. The public’s estimate was significantly predictable by background characteristics, as expected from economic theory. These results imply the feasibility and validity of the estimation approaches.
ISSN:0303-8300
1573-0921
DOI:10.1007/s11205-021-02640-8