The Economic Impact of Violence Has Soared

According to the 2025 Global Peace Index, released by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the global economic impact of violence reached a staggering $19.97 trillion in 2024, equivalent to 11.6 percent of global GDP or $2,455 per person. A grim milestone in what the IEP calls "The Great Fragmentation", an era marked by the internationalization of local conflicts and a breakdown in global consensus. Our infographic, which tracks the estimated costs of various conflicts' impact around the world between 2008 and 2024, reveals a sharp increase over the past fifteen years.

The most harrowing metric in the 2025 index is the human toll. Since the GPI’s inception in 2008, the estimated economic impact of conflict deaths has surged by an alarming 421 percent. The data for 2024 shows the majority of these fatalities took place in just three countries: Ukraine, Russia and Palestine, highlighting the intense lethality of modern conventional warfare compared to the insurgencies of the early 2000s. The other categories that saw the largest increases in economic impact between 2008 and 2024 are GDP losses due to conflict (+412 percent) and costs related to refugees and internally displaced persons (+212 percent). It represents a three- to fivefold increase for these three categories.