Violence has a financial dimension. War has devastating effects on a country's economy. Yet the greatest cost to society comes from a very different form of violence. It is not military conflict – but domestic violence – that has the highest cost worldwide. Conflict researchers Anke Hoeffler and James D. Fearon say that the resulting financial impacts are several times larger than the cost of war.
The media is full of news of war, terrorism and armed conflict, and this shapes our perceptions of violence. However, if we look at the costs resulting from these forms of violence, the numbers are surprising: About 12 percent of the global cost of comes from war and terrorism. However, a much larger proportion of the costs is caused by interpersonal violence – in particular, domestic violence against women and children. This violence results in immense human suffering – and massive damages to economies and societies worldwide. In concrete numbers: The global cost of violence is estimated at between 23 and 34 trillion US dollars each year. The estimated cost of interpersonal violence (including domestic violence) ranges between 20.3 and just under 30 trillion US dollars.
These are the findings of Anke Hoeffler, a professor of development research and member of the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality" at the University of Konstanz, and James D. Fearon, a professor of political science at Stanford University, published in their new book "
Worse than War: The Global Costs of Violence". In the book, they calculate the global cost of different forms of violence. The aim is not to trivialize wars and their impacts. Instead, their research makes it clear that other forms of violence are massively underestimated by society – because they take place in private spaces and are thus less visible than armed conflicts.
Measuring violence in economic terms
In the study, Hoeffler and Fearon first calculated the frequency of different forms of violence. They collected global conflict data sets and official statistics on healthcare, policing and criminal justice in addition to using data from surveys of victims of interpersonal violence. In a second step, the authors distinguished between the costs resulting from different forms of violence. In order to compare forms of violence in economic terms, the authors split the costs into different types. Anke Hoeffler explains: "Imagine someone is injured in a knife attack and has to go to the hospital. Either the person or the healthcare system pays the cost of this medical care. These are the concrete and tangible costs of acts of violence. At the same time, there are also indirect costs that can also be measured economically. For example, if an injured person cannot work, then this results in a loss of productivity, including long-term health effects, increased dropout rates, lower employment prospects and a cost to social welfare systems."
Yet there is also a third type of costs that plays a decisive role: intangible costs – costs that cannot be quantified or measured directly. This includes, for example, pain, suffering, traumatization or losses to quality of life. These consequences are not visible as direct government expenses, but they do reduce social welfare – and thus constitute part of the economic cost calculation. These costs are especially massive for domestic violence and violence against children. "We found that the intangible costs of interpersonal violence are larger than the total overall cost of collective violence – that is from war and terrorism", Hoeffler says.
The challenge: Finding a method to measure intangible costs
To measure these intangible costs in economic terms, Hoeffler and Fearon used the concept "value of a statistical life". Important: This concept does not calculate the value of a specific person's life, but rather, it asks how much a society is willing to pay to prevent a single death. This type of calculation is also used in other policy areas, such as traffic safety, environmental or health policy.
As a government decides whether to introduce expensive security measures, the decision is often based on precisely this question: How high are the costs of the measure in relationship to lives saved and prevented injuries? The frequency with which a form of violence occurs is then multiplied with the estimated costs per case. This makes it possible to calculate and compare global totals for the costs resulting from different forms of violence.
The calculations by Hoeffler and Fearon make it clear that, especially in the case of forms of violence that are the greatest social cost factors, too little action is being taken. "Our research unmistakably shows: Investing in measures to prevent domestic violence is well worth the effort – not only for social, ethical and human rights reasons, but also from an economic perspective", Anke Hoeffler concludes.
About Anke Hoeffler
Anke Hoeffler is a professor of development research at the University of Konstanz and a member of the Cluster of Excellence "The Politics of Inequality". Her research focuses on economic development, conflict and violence. Together with James D. Fearon, she published the book "Worse Than War: The Global Costs of Violence" with Princeton University Press. In the In_equality Podcast she talks about the cost of violence, the methods used in the study and potential political measures to prevent violence.
If you have questions you can contact: office.hoeffler@uni-konstanz.de |