The Economist April 12th 2014 International

1

2 The odds of being murdered

Dicing with death

CONGRATULATIONS: ifyou arereading this then you are not one of

the 437,000 people whose lives ended asstatistics in a grisly report on murderpublished on April 10th by the UN Officeon Drugs and Crime. The unfortunatehalf-million were all those around theworld who were slain in 2012. The aver-age person thus had roughly a one in16,000 chance ofbeing bumped offthatyear. But as the UN’s figures make clear,there is no such thing as an average per-son. How can you shorten your odds ofmaking it through 2014?

First, don’t live in the Americas orAfrica, where murder rates (one in 6,100and one in 8,000 respectively) are morethan four times as high as the rest of theworld. Western Europe and East Asia arethe safest regions. And the safest coun-tries? Liechtenstein recorded no murdersat all in 2012, but its population could fitin a football stadium. Among those coun-tries whose populations number inmillions, the safest is Singapore, whichclocked up just11murders in 2012, or onekilling per 480,000 people. In Honduras,the world’s most violent country, one inevery1,100 residents was killed.

Next, be a woman. Your chance ofbeing murdered will be barely a quarterwhat it would be were you a man. In fact,steer clear ofmen altogether: nearly halfofall female murder-victims are killed bytheir partner or another (usually male)

family member. But note that the genderimbalance is less pronounced in the richworld, probably because there is lessbanditry, a mainly male pursuit. In Japanand South Korea slightly over halfof allmurder victims are female.

Then, sit backand grow older. Fromthe age of30 onwards, murder rates fallsteadily in most places. But not every-where. Europeans are more at risk inmiddle age than in youth. Europeanwomen cannot let their guard down evenin retirement: those aged over 60 aremore likely to be murdered than thoseaged 15-29. The UN speculates that thismay be because they are more likely tohave partners, and those partners aremore likely to drink. Other studies havefound that alcohol featured in half ofmurders in Australia, Finland and Swe-den, making it a more common factorthan any weapon.

And ifyou are killed? The chances areno one will be convicted. Worldwideonly 43% ofmurders result in someonebeing put behind bars. This, too, varieshugely: whereas Europe’s police solveeight out of ten murders and those in Asiaclear up nearly half, three-quarters ofkillers in the Americas escape justice (asmaller share in North America; a higherone elsewhere in the region). As long asthat continues, there is little reason tothink that the region’s fearsome murderrate will be tamed.

The UN offers some hints on howto avoid being bumped off

Blood on the page

SouthAfrica

1/1,908Brazil

1/2,473UnitedStates

1/13,450Singapore1/256,100

Honduras1/599

In Honduras, the world’s most violent country, one man in every 599 was murdered in 2012. To help readers visualise this statistic, we have created a (rare) print-only interactive chart. Stick this page of The Economist on the wall, don a blindfold, and throw a dart in its general direction. The chance of it hitting the large red

square (assuming it lands somewhere on the page; if it doesn’t, try again) is the same as a Honduran man’s annual chance of being murdered. The chance for a man in Singapore, the world’s safest country with a population in the millions, is the same as your dart’s chance of hitting the tiny red speck to the left. Over a lifetime (assuming a life expectancy of 71 years and a stable murder rate), a Honduran man’s risk of being killed accumulates to a horrifying one in nine. That is equivalent to the chances of your dart landing anywhere in this red-outlined box.

Odds of being murdered in one yearMen, 2012 or latest

heaval in Egypt to Jumia.com, an online re-tailer. Internet penetration rose as peoplesought reliable news. And because thestreets were rowdy, explains Mattia Per-roni, Jumia’s boss in Egypt, people wereless keen to shop on the street. Online re-tailers prospered.

Sometimes the path from trouble to op-portunity is more direct. During the inter-necine violence in Colombia in the 1990s,Miguel Caballero knew a politician’sdaughter who was tired of wearing heavybody armour. His firm developed a light-weight, haute couture alternative that isnow available in Harrods, a high-end Lon-don department store. It has sincebranched out into bulletproof backpacksfor American schoolchildren. “In every-thing bad,” observes that Syrian banker,“there is something good.” 7

IN 2000 policy wonks from governmentsand aid organisations agreed on what

would become the Millennium Develop-ment Goals, an ambitious set of develop-ment targets for 2015. Surprisingly, the finewords prompted concerted action. From2001 to 2010 the aid devoted to health caregrew by more than 10% a year, comparedwith 7% a year in the 1990s. Most of thenew money went on fighting the scourgeson the list: HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculo-sis, and maternal and infant mortality.

The growth in health-care aid has nowslowed to less than halfthe rate ofthe early2000s. And as 2015 approaches, donors aremulling new health-care goals. Ideas willbe discussed at a big meeting of the WorldBank and IMF in Washington, DC, on April11th-13th. One is to make aid money go fur-ther by increasing the use of cash incen-tives for patients or health-care providers.Rather than merely buy inputs such as vac-cines, donors would pay for results, suchas each child who is immunised.

Such schemes can improve outcomes:one in Rwanda that offered cash rewardsfor clinics increased the share of womengiving birth in the clinic, rather than athome, by 23%. But the design and imple-mentation need thought, says Tim Evansof the World Bank: another in the Demo-cratic Republic of Congo that paid clinicsfor offering more services—more prenatalconsultations and childhood immunisa-tions, for example—made little difference,perhaps because the bonus paymentswere too small.

Since 2008 the World Bankhas devoted$2.5 billion to programmes that pay at leastpartly by results. It, and other donors, arethinking of shifting more of their spendingto such schemes. But even if the outcome isgreaterefficiency, itwill notdeal with a big-ger problem: the growing burden of chron-ic diseases in the developing world.

Research by Christopher Murray of theUniversity of Washington published on

April 8th in the journal Health Affairsshows a growing mismatch between theailments donors spend most on tackling,and those that are taking the heaviest toll.About 55% of all aid for health care in 2011,the most recent year for which global fig-ures were available, went to areas identi-fied by the Millennium DevelopmentGoals. Just 1% went to chronic ailmentssuch as diabetes and heart disease, though

Aid for health care

New prescriptions

Chronicdiseases and a cash squeeze areprompting donors to rethinkspending