Exploring the Relationship Between IT Development, Poverty and Cybercrime: An Armenia Case Study

This paper explores the relationship between IT development, regional
poverty, and cybercrime, through the case of Armenia. Armenia was
selected as it is a former Soviet state that has sought to promote the
development of its IT sector in recent years, which has occurred within a
context of widespread regional poverty. The paper acknowledges the
potentially cyber-criminogenic interactions between developed socio-technological and impoverished legitimate economic conditions, that the
literature has noted in several high cybercrime nations. It then examines
the case of Armenia by exploring potentially cyber-criminogenic
conditions there and by constructing an overview of economic
cybercrime trends in Armenia since 2010. The paper finds that, despite
the promotion of IT development within the context of regional poverty,
cybercrime in Armenia remains low. It explores, through a series of
expert interviews, characteristics of the IT sector in Armenia that have
mitigated against the cyber-criminogenic interactions between these two
conditions. Finally, it identifies potentially transferable policy lessons,
wider theoretical implications, and avenues of future research that
emerge from this case.