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.