ÅLDERSSTRUKTURENS INVERKAN PÅ BROTTSLIGHETEN I SVERIGE

An aging population is a hot topic in these times, other studies have shown that this will have some negative consequences for our society. For an example less people will have to provide for a larger part of the population, like people in retirement age. And this change in the workforce will be a difficult task to manage. However this paper is studying a possible positive side effect of the ageing population. This paper will set out to try and examine the relation between the age structure and crime, our hypothesis is that a 70-year-old is less likely to commit a crime than a 20-year-old. If this hypothesis is true, a change in a country’s age structure should show a decrease in crime rates. To study this, this paper gathered statistics from Swedish authorities for both crime rates and its population over the time period from 1975-2018 in order to see what impact the aging population have had over crime rate. The conclusion of this paper is that we can observe a pattern of decrease in crime and an increase in the age structure, more specifically the percentage of people above the age of 65 and thus confirming our hypothesis. After we examined how much of this change the age structure can explain over the crime rates, we confirmed that it does indeed have a significant part of explaining the difference between this time period