The global economic impact of violence in 2013 was $9.8 trillion, an increase of $179 billion from 2012, according to the Global Peace Index, a study done by the Vision of Humanity initiative of the Institute for Economics and Peace. The GPI studies trends in violence: where it’s happening, where it could happen next, and how much it costs to live in a world where “500 million people live in countries at risk of instability and conflict.”

According to the GPI, the ten most peaceful countries, in order, from 2013 to 2014 were Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium, and Norway. The most violent countries were Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, and North Korea.

Among the 28 countries rated low or very low for their state of peace, ten were deemed most likely to deteriorate based on data from the year 2013: Zambia, Haiti, Argentina, Chad, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Nepal, Burundi, Georgia, Liberia, and Qatar. Missing from this list are several countries that have recently made headlines, like Ukraine and Iraq, though they both factored into the study’s conclusion that “the world [is] becoming slightly less peaceful.”

According to the GPI, a “global slide in peacefulness has now been in effect for the last seven years.” But the world is apparently only “slightly” less peaceful because many countries have improved or maintained their peacefulness, such as Iceland, who topped the index last year and continues to be the most peaceful country in the world.

The index does also highlight some good news. The countries of Georgia, Cote D’Ivoire, Libya, Burundi, and Mongollia have all shown the largest improvements in their peace scores. The countries with the sharpest increases in violence in 2013 were South Sudan, Egypt, Central African Republic, Ukraine, and Syria.

The GPI calculated scores and rankings by looking at 22 indicators for each country, such as terrorist activity, the number of internal and external conflicts fought, the number of displaced people as a percentage of the population, political terror, the number of homicides per 100,000 people, and the number armed services personnel per 100,000 people. The global cost of violence is calculated using a method that “values thirteen different dimensions of violence and conflict, allowing for relative comparisons to be made between 162 countries as well as aggregating the amount to arrive at a global figure.” Some of the categories used in estimating the global cost of violence are military expenditure, homicides, internal and private security, violent crime, deaths from internal and external conflict, UN peace keeping, IDPs and refugees, and terrorism. Terrorism had a significant effect on the US in 2013, with the Boston marathon bombing accounting most for the deterioration of the state of peace. The US dropped from 88th place in 2012 to 101th in 2013. Within the US, Vision of Humanity ranked Louisiana the most dangerous state and Maine the most peaceful

Full report http://www.visionofhumanity.org/sites/default/files/2014%20Global%20Peace%20Index%20REPORT_0.pdf