The Costs and Impacts of Gender-Based Violence in Developing Countries: Methodological Considerations and New Evidence

Andrew Morrison, World Bank Group
Maria Beatriz Orlando, World Bank Group

GBV has devastating consequences not only for victims but also for society as a whole. A growing body of research has focused on dimensioning these consequences either by estimating the impacts of GBV on a set of outcomes or by measuring the monetary costs of GBV. This paper has three goals. First, it synthesizes the research on estimating the costs and impacts of GBV, presenting and evaluating the methodologies used to produce cost and impact estimates. The focus is on methodologies which are potentially most relevant to developing countries. A second goal of this paper is to use a relatively new methodology—propensity score matching—to generate comparable, cross-country estimates of some of the impacts of GBV in Haiti, Peru and Zambia. This methodology has not previously been used on a cross-country basis to estimate the impacts of GBV. Finally, the paper identifies priority areas for future research.