Abstract:
This study examines, firstly, the determination of economic, social and physical factors on crime rate in Thailand and, secondly, the effect of the effort of preventing and suppressing crime of the Thai police department on crime rate. We used OLS (Ordinary least square) method and utilized panel data during 1999-2008 of 76 provinces in Thailand. Our results indicate that, physical factors, namely factory density and neighborhood provinces affect positively on crime rate. The proportion of secondary school graduates, which reflect high cost of crime has negative relation to crime rate since the number of population density affect negatively relation to crime rate while proportion of foreign workers has positive relation to crime rate. Moreover we found that, provincial economic activities define by gross provincial product per capita and the coverage of social safety net, they will not contribute on crime rate decreasing if there dont have sufficient magnitude. The effort for crime suppression defines by the ratio of arrested per offences will decrease significantly the province crime rate. In addition, we found that the contribution of each factors are different by type of crime for example the magnitude of unemployment will increase the violent crime. The areas with lower population density (i.e. remote area) tend to have less drug cases, prostitution cases, gambling cases.