Selected Countries

The best source of information we can find on comparative violence levels across countries is from the World Health Organization (WHO) Mortality Statistics. The agency collects data on causes of death from 77 countries and regions. Among the more than 100 causes listed, three are pertinent to our study: "Homicide and injury purposely inflicted by other persons," "Other violence," and "Other external causes." We add these three numbers together and combine them with the WHO Estimated Mortality Coverage (Table 4) data to produce the "Deaths by Violence" statistics reported below.

Following the rankings/data listed below, we provide more details about measuring violence levels including the limitations of our approach, the validity of our measure, its correlates, and suggestions for future improvements. Please contact John Graham (jgraham@uci.edu or 949-824-8468) if you have questions.

Rank	Country	Violent Deaths (per 100,000)		Rank	Country	Violent Deaths (per 100,000)
1 2 2 4 4 6 6 8 9 10 11 11 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 19 21 22 23 24 25 26 26 28 29 29 31 32 32 34 35 36 37 38 38	Norway Greece Spain Austria Netherlands Japan New Zealand Australia Luxembourg Ireland Iceland Malta Canada Italy Mauritus U.K. Northern Ireland Macedonia Kuwait France Germany Hungary U.K. England, Wales Belgium Croatia San Marino Sweden U.K. (total) Tajikistan Finland Romania Czech Republic Slovakia Denmark South Korea Bulgaria Uruguay Albania Slovenia Switzerland	1 1.3 1.3 1.7 1.7 2 2 2.1 2.2 2.5 2.6 2.5 2.7 2.8 3.1 3.5 3.6 3.8 3.9 3.9 4 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.6 4.9 5.1 5.1 5.2 5.5 5.5 5.8 5.9 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.1		40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 47 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77	U.K. Scotland Cuba United States Poland Israel Costa Rica Singapore Azerbaijan Uzbekistan Thailand Turkmenistan Peru Mexico Panama Armenia Portugal Argentina Nicaragua Lithuania Paraguay Chile Kyrgyzstan Georgia Latvia Belize Estonia Republic of Moldova Belarus Dominican Republic Ecuador Kazakhstan Ukraine Brazil Venezuela El Salvador Philippines Russian Federation** Columbia	7.3 7.6 7.9 8.1 8.3 8.5 8.8 9.2 9.2 10.2 10.4 12.9 13.3 13.8 15.2 15.6 16.8 18.5 19.1 19.3 19.6 22.1 22.5 23.4 23.5 25.3 25.4 31.3 32.8 33.2 36.1 36.5 36.7 44.9 50.8 58.1 76.8 77.1
					** Chechnya not included

Limitations. The WHO Mortality Statistics include data from only 77 of some 200 countries around the world. The data are collected from hospitals and compiled by government entities. So, the majority of countries, e.g., populous countries such as India, Indonesia, and China are not included in the data - those countries do not systematically collect this information and/or do not choose to report it to the WHO. Please go to www3.who.int/whosis/menu.cfm for more details and descriptions of the data - click on "Causes of Death" and then "Table 1" for the data details.

The most recent year for which "Causes of Death" are reported to the WHO depends on the country. For example, Argentina's latest reported estimate is for 1997 statistics while the United States currently reports year 2000 data. In all cases, the data ranges from 1997 to 2000 so we are looking back in time at violence levels. And we know that in the United States, for example, homicide rates have declined substantially between 1997 and 2001, 7.3(/100,000) to about 5.5. These data do not include the deaths resulting from the September 11th events in 2001. However, the data used for ranking the 66 countries are collected contemporaneously, so the comparisons are appropriate in that respect. And, these are the best data we can find for our purposes.

We appreciate that arguments can be made to include other categories of violence including rape, suicide, torture, permanent injury, or even automobile accidents. However, we feel our approach appropriately focuses on "violence" as it can best be measured.

We are very interested in any and all suggestions for improvements - please contact John Graham at jgraham@uci.edu. All your comments and criticisms are most welcome. Our goal is to improve our methods for the 2004 Peace Monitor that will be published in March of that year and annually thereafter.

Validity. We checked the WHO data against two other sources of data for the United States - the Center for Disease Control (CDC at webapp.cdc.gov) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI at www.fbi.gov). For the year 1997 the numbers of homicides reported (one aspect of our "Deaths by Violence" scores) for the three agencies are roughly comparable: WHO - 19,491; CDC - 19,846; and FBI - 18,210. Or, on a per 100,000 basis the numbers are: WHO - 7.3; CDC - 7.4; and FBI - 6.8. The FBI count is lower because they are taken from crime reports data while both the CDC and the WHO gather data from medical records. The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting measure of homicide is narrower than the CDC and WHO. For example, felons killed by police officers in the line of duty are not included in the FBI numbers.

In any case, the FBI statistic is within 10% of the highest CDC statistic, and the WHO number falls nicely between the other two. When we make these same comparisons for 1995 and 1996 we see the same relationships.

Correlates. Perusal of the Peace Monitor scores begs the question of why the variation across countries. Indeed, our hope is that these rankings will prove useful in the study of the causes and consequences of violence and peace.

We have taken a quick look at a variety of other country-level variables and their correlations with the Peace Monitor scores. We found higher violence levels to be associated with higher poverty levels (r = .571), higher levels of corruption (r = .548), lower levels of income per capita (r = -.505), higher values for social hierarchy (r = .423), and lower levels of trade with other countries (r = -.353), all statistically significant (p < 0.01). Of course, many of these comparison variables are themselves highly correlated, and we certainly make no claims about causality. Moreover, we have not carefully considered theory, previous work, and explanations. Indeed, we hope our brief report here will stimulate more careful research in the area.

The measures for poverty levels ("population below the poverty line"), income ("GDP - per capita"), and trade ("Imports" plus "Exports" divided by population) were taken from the CIA World Factbook 2001 at www.cia.gov/publications/factbook/. The measure of values for social hierarchy was taken from Geert Hofstede's Power Distance Index (PDI), see Cultures Consequences, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002. The measure of levels of corruption was taken from the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (CPI), see www.transparency.org for details.

Future Research. We intend to further verify the validity of our measure of violence by comparisons across other data sources in other countries. The relationship of our measure to other kinds of violence - e.g., rape and suicide - should also be determined. The causal relationships among exogenous and other endogenous constructs should be considered. Finally, as we will be reporting these statistics annually, longitudinal approaches to study a variety of research questions will be facilitated.

---

US States*