Measuring the effect of governance-type organised crime on local communities and markets: a quasi-natural experiment on Japan

• In Event: WG-PLACE 5: Neighbourhoods and Crime

Abstract

Japanese criminal syndicates, collectively known as the yakuza, are a long-established criminal organisation spread all over Japan that has exerted a governance dimension over the communities in which they operate. Since their association is not illegal, syndicates openly establish their territorial presence through multi-storey offices from which they run business and activities. Critically, as a governance-type organised crime (OC) associations, yakuza syndicates not only engage in illegal activities but also pivot through the local regular economy, playing an institutional role on illegal and semi-legal markets and actors, both as economic facilitators and community regulators. The impact of governance-type OC in the neighbourhoods they inhabit is a debated topic. This paper addresses the extant discussion by leveraging on a recent regulatory change which enforced tighter restrictions on the yakuza’s territorial grasp, ranging from imposing a more discreet local presence to the closure of some of their offices. We examine the effects of yakuza offices’ closure on local social and economic landscapes. To do so, we exploit a novel institutional dataset on yakuza’s office activity (including suspension of operations and closure) covering 39 municipalities (corresponding to 307,901 city blocks, equivalent to the 14% of Japan population). By controlling for demographic and socio-economic characteristics of micro-territories, we are able to perform a quasi-natural experiment that isolates the institutional impact of OC on local societies and economies. We find that the role of OC is complex and context-dependant. We use this information to generate several policy recommendations.

Authors

• Martina Baradel, University of Oxford

• Andrea Giovannetti, Australian Catholic University