How much does violence cost?

This blog, written by Philippa Lysaght with the Institute for Economics and Peace, is about a new report on the international costs of global violence. It is part of the Wikiprogress series on Peace.

The international cost of violence containment has surpassed the combined GDPs of Germany and Japan.

The Economic Cost of Violence Containment, the latest report from the Institute for Economics and Peace, calculates the cost of violence in over 150 countries according to 13 types of violence related spending.

The research shows that violence containment, which is understood as any economic activity related to the prevention or consequences of violence, has a global economic impact of US$9.56 trillion.

To put this in perspective, violence containment is equal to US$1,300 for every person on the planet every year and is almost double the size of the world’s agriculture industry.

Violence containment spending is over 2.4 times the size of the total GDP of Africa. 

 

While some spending on violence containment is necessary, the less a nation spends on violence-related functions, the more resources can be allocated to other more productive areas, such as education and health, which benefit not only the wellbeing of a society, but also the economy.

Reducing violence containment spending and investing in the underlying institutions that encourage peace and wellbeing, creates more peaceful and economically prosperous societies. 

The aim of this research is to help understand the full costs of conflict and to ultimately allow for better targeting of development assistance.

To find out more about violence containment spending, and to see how much each country spends, download the report here (PDF).

- Philippa Lysaght, Institute for Economics and Peace

See Also:

The Global Peace Index
Pillars of Peace
Global Peace Index Report 2012
United Kingdom Peace Index
Mexico Peace Index
United States Peace Index
Peace, Wealth and Human Potential

 

The Road to 2015 is Paved with Open Data

This blog, by David Hall-Matthews, managing director at Publish What You Fund is about the data revolution, specifically concerning aid transparency. This is the 17th post in ODI's blog series on ‘What kind of ‘data revolution’ do we need for post-2015?’ This post is also a part of the Wikiprogress series on Data and Statistics and Post-2015. 

Transparency is a key pillar of sustainable development: an essential piece of the puzzle to enable effectiveness, accountability and social change. And in recent years, information on aid spending has slowly become more available and open.
 

The basic principle that aid information should be publicly available is now accepted as an essential component of international development. Nowhere has that been seen more prominently than the discussions around the post-2015 Development Goals.

We have two years to create new goals. Too often, in development, looming deadlines induce resignation and recrimination – but there are still reasons to be optimistic for the future of aid transparency and open data within the post-2015 process.

Credit is due to the High Level Panel for their boldness and dynamism. Their call for a “data revolution” set the tone for debates on a range of issues, and quickly became one of the buzz phrases of 2013.

There is no question that the “data revolution” means open data. Making detailed information available to everyone, even on something as well-established as aid, would be genuinely radical.

But buzz phrases can mean different things to different people. Many commentators have focused on inequalities of access to information. While it is of course essential to highlight obstacles to data use by the poorest, it would be foolish to put the cart before the horse. Before anyone can use data, there must be data out there.

Others have pointed out that the data revolution can’t be imposed from above. I agree – but we shouldn’t let an insistence on bottom-up approaches let those at the top off the hook on their own transparency commitments. Changes at the top can make a difference.

Aid may not be the most important resource flow after 2015, but making it transparent can make a significant difference to the problematic top-down relationships between donor and recipient nations – and it can set an example for other flows, because aid transparency has had a head-start.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is the only existing international open data standard now in use. Knowing how difficult it is to make new agreements – let alone implement common standards – that’s a massive achievement. Any serious attempt to start a data revolution in 2015 would be crazy to overlook a system that works.

IATI works because:
It’s relatively easy to publish to it. Organisations only need to convert information they hold into a common format, then send links to an online registry.
It’s relatively easy to use the data. It’s raw, and will need to be interpreted to make sense to everyone (like all information), but it’s fully accessible and – critically – comparable.
It’s relatively easy to adopt the standard. Many non-traditional providers of development finance, including NGOs, climate finance providers, philanthropic foundations, development finance institutions and private companies have published to IATI.

IATI itself will be too limited to encompass all resource and information flows. But new standards – for example on domestic budget transparency, or extractive industry payments, could adopt the template – and common code – to make it as easy as possible for users to compare, contrast and collate.

There is increasingly more data out there – now we must make it a useful weapon in the fight to end poverty. We are working hard to ensure donors are becoming more open and now we are working hard to ensure information will be put to use.

We know that raw data may not be understood by the average person on the street, but don’t be fooled into thinking that only small packages of neatly visualised information can be understood. That’s an excuse used too easily by those seeking to control what data is released.

IATI was built specifically in response to partner country, civil society and government requests for more detailed, useful information on money coming into their countries. All donors should publish to IATI if they want to truly bolster the bottom-up approach to international development. It doesn’t make sense for donors to be suggesting new goals and ways to hold partner countries to account, without doing their own bit first.

The end of 2015 is not only the deadline to agree new Development Goals. It is also the date by when the Busan Partnership Agreement needs to be implemented.

Our Aid Transparency Index, the industry standard for assessing transparency among the world’s major donors, shows that most donors have quite a way to go to meeting their Busan commitments. The average score for all 67 organisations was disappointingly low, despite the many international commitments and speeches about openness.

For example, France is the third largest donor in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), spending over USD 1 billion in 2011. But we could find no comprehensive listing of the country’s current aid activities for DRC – or for any other recipient country. Similarly, Japan is the second largest donor in DRC, spending over USD 1.2 billion in 2011. But their database does not include basic information on the projects it’s funding, such as start or end dates of projects or their current status.

In other words, over USD 2 billion in aid to DRC – an aid dependent and fragile state –remains unmonitored. And much of the information we could get was out of date, patchy and difficult to compare with that of other funders operating in DRC.

It’s not all bad though. A leading group of organisations is publishing large amounts of useful information on their current aid activities. And some donors have made real progress over the past year. So there is reason to hope for better aid transparency by 2015.

Open data and transparency are becoming fashionable watch words, but we’re checking if donors are really delivering, looking beyond high-level commitments and long-held reputations. Crucially, we are measuring donors’ progress on the road to 2015.

- David Hall-Matthews

This post first appeared January 16, 2014 on ODI's Post2015.org site.

Busan: Yes we could

Today’s post originally appeared on the OECD Insights Blog 

We’ll start with a close-up of a woman on her knees. She seems to be scrubbing some tiles. We track back and see that in fact she’s scrubbing the tyre tracks off a forecourt. Back a bit more and we see that she and her colleagues are in front of a huge conference centre. It’s covered with banners in Korean and English announcing the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, HLF4.  There’s a metaphor there somewhere, and it’s called Busan, the host city and the world’s fifth largest port.

Busan is like a life-sized lesson for participants in this conference. As the Korean president Lee Myung-bak reminded delegates in his speech to the conference, when he was a child, this was one of the poorest countries in the world, and Busan was used to import food to stop people starving after the civil war. In From Poverty to Power, Oxfam’s Duncan Green makes this point too, recalling that 50 years ago Korea’s main export was wigs made from human hair.

Aid played a part in this, and it’s worth looking at why Korea succeed in moving from being a recipient to a member of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, the donor group that oversees Official Development Assistance (ODA).

The first lesson is that ODA has to be stable and reflect a long-term commitment. Korea could count on the US and Japan, and knew from one year to the next what funding to expect. Volatility makes programme management harder, or even impossible. I’ve heard stories from the field of health, education, and other projects that were started, were going well and then had to be stopped because promised funding suddenly dried up. The OECD says that the value of aid is reduced by 15% to 20% when it is unpredictable and volatile.

For the outsider, one of the more opaque terms of the “aid community’s” particularly opaque jargon is “ownership”. What it means is that countries receiving aid take charge of the process. Korea didn’t always agree with its partners, but the results show that it knew best what strategy corresponded to its needs and resources. It wanted non-military aid rather than the guns, tanks and planes it was being offered, and it insisted on focusing on large enterprises rather than the small and medium-sized businesses foreign development experts told it were the key to success. Samsung and Sons would no doubt have been a great little shop for the latest Japanese and American gadgets.

However, to “own” the development process a country needs to develop a whole range of skills and institutions. For instance, if it’s going to export, it needs lawyers who understand international trade rules and port managers who can get the goods onto the ships on time. This is what’s meant by “capacity building”. Countries can’t be expected to acquire all these capacities on their own, but they shouldn’t depend on outsiders either. While over 1500 foreign experts were sent to Korea between 1962 and 1971, over 5 times as many Koreans received training abroad.

Another thing about aid programmes is that the best ones become useless because they’re no longer needed. In the 1950s and 1960s, practically all of Korea’s foreign funding came from grants, but by the mid-70s, grants only represented 11% of funds, the rest being loans. The fact that Korea respected repayment conditions reassured private finance and encouraged foreign direct investment in the country. 

Korea also proves that it’s possible to recover from even the most desperate situation. At the end of the 1950s this was a mainly agricultural country still suffering from a war that had killed or injured over 2.5 million civilians. If conference delegates want to see a success story, they just have to look around them. And if they want a reminder that the fruits of economic success aren’t always shared equally, they can look at those women scrubbing the ground they walk on.

By Patrick Love

 Useful links

OECD work on development cooperation