Efeitos do desenvolvimento econômico e da pandemia do COVID-19 na violência contra as mulheres em Minas Gerais

Abstract

Informed by the economics of crime and the literature on development and gender-based violence, this study investigates the extent to which economic development is related to violence against women at the municipal level and whether the Covid-19 pandemic changed the recorded rates of these crimes. Panel data models are estimated for different types of violence against women, including femicide, using indicators of education, per capita GDP and variables associated with the pandemic context. The results show negative and statistically significant coefficients for education in most specifications, indicating that higher educational attainment is associated with lower rates of physical violence, psychological violence and overall violence against women. Income has ambiguous effects in static models but tends to display the expected sign in dynamic specifications, suggesting that more favorable socioeconomic contexts are associated with lower levels of violence, although these estimates are sensitive to specification limitations. In the case of femicide, low incidence and spatial concentration generate imprecise estimates, with no robust effects of the development variables. The variables directly linked to the pandemic are not statistically significant, and there is no systematic increase in recorded cases in 2020–2021, despite a marked decline in the most recent years. The findings reinforce the role of education and socioeconomic conditions in protecting women and highlight the limitations of inferring the true incidence of violence from administrative data subject to underreporting and the challenges of modeling rare events.