Statistical analysis of the impact of social and economic factors on the level of crime as a threat to Russia's national security

Criminality is one of the most serious, socially significant problems. Such a negative phenomenon can hinder the social and economic development of the state, hinder the development of state’s favorable image in the world and threaten its national security. In order to avoid such consequences, it is urgent to identify and research the determinants that affect the spread of crime countrywide. The paper is devoted to the determination of the relationship of the crime rate in Russia with the set of social and economic indicators. The relevance of the research is connected with the increased variability of criminality and its constituent elements. The analysis is based on the data of the Federal State Statistics Service in 72 Russian regions for the period from 2015 to 2018. With the help of the correlation and regression analysis, it has been found that up to 42% of the variation in the indicator, i.e. the number of registered crimes per 100,000 people of the population, is explained by the factors that characterize the social and economic development and the well-being of society: the state of labor market, housing provision and level of urbanization. The obtained results are faithful to the original data, since the regressor coefficients are statistically significant, and the relationships do not contradict the economic logic. The data processing was made by means of the Gretl software package. It is concluded that a significant impact on the crime rate in Russia over the past 4 years had such factors as unemployment rate, total area of residential premises per inhabitant in average, and share of the urban population in the total population of the region.