Mind the Gap: Institutional Capacity, Globalization, and the Discrepancy between Criminal Justice and Health Homicide Data

We analyzed a maximum of 1,838 country-years for 99 countries from 1991 to 2020 where there was no missing data for any of the covariates. The data set makes up an unbalanced panel covering the years 1991 (for globalization) or 2000 (for capacity of public institutions and medical systems) to 2020. By pooling the cross-sectional data for a maximum of 99 countries covering nearly three decades, we have a diverse and reasonably large dataset for analysis. We operationalize the homicide gap as: 〖homicide gap〗_it=ln⁡|〖WHO count〗_it/Population_it -〖UNODC count〗_it/Population_it +0.001|*100 (1) where i denotes the country and t denotes the year. Our measure of the homicide gap is the natural logarithm of the absolute difference between the WHO and the UNODC homicide rate for country i at time t. We add 0.001 to avoid taking the log of zero and multiply the homicide gap by 100 to facilitate interpretation in the subsequent regression models. Because the absolute homicide gap exhibited a high level of skewness and kurtosis (13.16 and 207.06, respectively), we perform a natural log transformation. The Institutional Capacity Index (ICI) is the average of: 1) control of corruption; 2) voice and accountability; 3) rule of law; 4) government effectiveness; 5) regulatory quality; 6) political stability: and 7) an UNODC data quality recalculated score. To create the Health Capacity Index (HCI), we follow the Pan American Health Organization (2018) by combining positive health indicators (health spending per capita, life expectancy in years, and percent of one-year-old children with Hepatitis B immunization) with negative health indicators (cases of tuberculosis per 100,000 people, percent HIV among the population ages 15-49, death rate per 1,000 people, maternal mortality per 100,000 live births, and infant deaths per 1,000 live births). Our globalization measure is an index that includes 43 indicators from the KOF Swiss Economic Institute (Dreher, 2006; Gygli et al., 2019). The most and least globalized countries on this index are Switzerland (87.27) and Tajikistan (38.99), respectively.