Financial Consequences Of Firearm Fatalities In OECD Countries

Firearm-related fatalities are a global public health issue. However, few data exist about the macroeconomic effect of firearm-related fatalities.

To gain a better understanding of this issue, Alexander W. Peters from NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell and coauthors estimate the macroeconomic consequences of firearm-related fatalities in each of the thirty-six Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

The authors estimate cumulative losses of $239.0 billion in economic output from 2018 to 2030, with $152.5 billion attributable to the US alone, meaning that losses in the US exceed the combined losses of all other OECD countries.

The authors found that the highest relative losses will occur in Mexico and the US; the lowest will occur in Japan.

Across the OECD, they found that 48.5 percent of economic losses will be attributable to physical violence, 47.0 percent to self-harm, and 4.6 to unintentional injury.

They conclude by noting that reducing firearm-related fatalities is not only a humanitarian imperative, but also an economic one.