The authors ask when organized criminal groups respond to opportunities in licit commodity markets with violence. Their central contribution is to link rapid increases in a good’s share of global export value to incentives for criminal expansion, and to assemble evidence at both subnational and cross-national levels to test that mechanism. The paper uses avocado exports in Mexico as a detailed case and then combines international datasets to examine whether agricultural export booms correspond with higher homicide where organized crime exists.
subnational avocado export evidence Google Trends used to probe reverse causality cross-national association conditional on organized crime presence
Data and methods
The authors report subnational analyses using data on avocado exports from Mexico and a robustness check using Google Trends for searches like “avocado toast” to address reverse causality concerns. They also combine cross-national sources—citing the Atlas of Economic Complexity, V-Dem, and UNODC—to test whether changes in a country’s share of global export value for agricultural goods relate to homicide outcomes where organized criminal groups are present.
Main findings
The study reports that rapid increases in a good’s export-value share create opportunities that can motivate violent expansion by criminal groups. Subnational evidence from Mexico’s avocado exports is presented alongside a Google Trends check for reverse causality. Cross-national analyses are reported to show an association between increases in agricultural export shares and more homicides, but only in contexts where organized criminal groups are present.
- Subnational case: evidence drawn from Mexican avocado export data.
- Reverse-causality probe: analyzed Google Trends search popularity as a robustness check.
- Cross-national: combined Atlas of Economic Complexity, V-Dem, and UNODC data to test conditional associations.
