Border effect in assessing the immigration impact on drug crime in Russian regions

The subject of the study is demographic and socio-economic factors influencing drug crimes in Russian regions. The goal is to econometrically assess the impact of various types of immigration, as well as some other factors, on drug crime in Russian regions, taking into account their border status. We tested three hypotheses: H1) increasing immigration rises the level of drug crimes in Russian regions; H2) the border status of regions is a factor increasing the number of crimes connected with drug trafficking; H3) the effect of immigration in border regions on the level of drug crimes is higher than in non-border regions. We used panel data from 2009-2020 for 83 regions of the Russian Federation. To eliminate the problem of cross-sectional dependence of the data, standard errors were recalculated using the Driscoll-Kraay method. The dependent variable is the share of registered crimes related to drug trafficking in the total number of registered crimes in the region. Three immigration indicators are used: intraregional, interregional and international. Control variables reflect economic development, age-specific unemployment rates, and divorce rates. Included are a binary variable for the region’s border status, and a cross-sectional variable as the product of the binary variable and immigration. The results of the analysis allow us to accept all our hypotheses. We have found that an increase in international immigration on average leads to an increase in drug crime in Russian regions by 0.03%. However, it has been established that interregional immigration has a greater impact on drug crimes across regions on the whole (an increase of 0.05%). Inclusion of a cross-sectional variable in the regressions made it possible to detect the border effect for each type of immigration and establish that in border regions the influence of immigration increases the share of such crimes more strongly. It has been confirmed that divorces and unemployment among the young population aggravate the situation with drug crime. The obtained results may be useful in developing a system of measures to combat drug crimes in various regions, including migration policy.