Qatar ranks high in Global Peace Index

Qatar has ranked first out of 19 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region and 30 out of 162 countries in this year's Global Peace Index (GPI) released yesterday.

Qatar has had fairly stable levels of peace, with little change in the last eight years since the GPI was launched. This is in part due to the state's relatively high levels of internal peace; Qatar gets the best score for low levels of internal conflict.

Escalating civil strife and the consequent refugee crisis have been among the key drivers in increasing the cost of global violence containment, according to GPI published by global think-tank Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP).

Since 2008 the total economic impact of violence has increased by $1.9trn (+15.3 percent) worldwide. As for Qatar, it was estimated to cost the national economy $11.1bn last year.

The economic impact of refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide has increased by 267 percent since 2008, and now amounts to $128bn.

However, military expenditure, homicide and police forces remain the most costly categories, accounting collectively for 68.3 percent of the total cost.

Steve Killelea, Founder and Executive Chairman, IEP, said, "Reducing conflict is a crucial plank in ensuring continued world economic recovery. If global violence were to decrease by 10 percent uniformly, an additional $1.43trn would effectively be added to the world economy.

"To put this in perspective, this is more than six times the total value of Greece's bailout and loans from IMF, ECB and other Eurozone countries combined."

Overall, global peace levels remained stable in 2014; but are lower than 2008. [Read more on The Peninsula]

PC: Yoshika Kehelpannala