Peace is good for the economy

Thanks to Greg Gerritt for sending this over to us.  Though we certainly understood there was costs to war, the percentage drag on the global economy surprised us.  We are wondering, though, if that is net of jobs, investment that directly fuels war and military systems?

From a pure sustainability prism, putting that 11% into transportation/grid/energy improvements would kick us into very high gear.  War is messy business.   Green is not.

Thanks to the Institute for Economics and Peace for this report.

Peace is good for the economy

Foreign Policy in Focus - The Institute for Economics and Peace has calculated that war and violence worldwide has a net 11-percent drag on the global economy. The IEP’s Global Peace Index ranks countries based on their peacefulness, and the correlation between peace and prosperity is almost absolute. GDP per capita rises by approximately $3,000 for every ten places higher in the peace index. The data indicates a clear correlation between peacefulness and prosperity. With the exception of a few statistical outliers, peaceful countries are prosperous and countries mired in violence are not.

The United States ranks 99 out of 162 countries in the 2013 Index. The low status is due to internal factors such as violent crime and the world’s highest incarceration rate, as well as external engagement in warfare and high military spending. As a prosperous country, the United States is among the few exceptions to the peace and prosperity correlation, but we could do better on both counts. The IEP publication Violence Containment in the United States concludes that “If policy makers clearly understood the economic burden of non-productive violence containment, then improving the levels of peacefulness would be seen as central to long term structural reforms.