The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, all else being equal, for the
case of Italy, tourist areas tend to have a greater amount of crime than non-tourist areas
in the long run. Following the literature of the economics of crime à la Becker (1968)
and Ehrlich (1973) and using a system GMM approach for the time span 1985–2003,
the authors empirically test whether total crime in Italy is affected by tourist arrivals.
Findings confirm the initial intuition of a positive relationship between tourism and
crime in destinations. When controlling for the difference between tourists and
residents in the propensity to be victimized, no relevant differences are found: the
likelihood to be victimized is quite similar for the two groups. As a consequence,
agglomeration and urbanisation effects seem to be the main explanation for the impact
of tourism on crime. One can image that overcrowded cities provide more
opportunities to criminals to commit illegal acti
have increased on average by 2.2% and tourist nights by 0.5%. As a result,
the average length of stay decreased from about 6 days to 4. This
downward trend of tourist nights is in line with the EU trend where the
number of nights has decreased more than the number of trips (-1.6 % and -
1.0 % respectively; Eurostat, 2011).
In 2003, more than fifty per cent of tourist arrivals an