21/03/2016

Professor Biman Prasad

Faculty of Business and Economics

Any incident involving the occurrence, attempt or threat of

either physical or sexual assault(ABS, 1996)

Statistics on domestic violence for good economic studies

is a big challenge
Positive aspect is that the collection of data on domestic
violence in improving
Contribution of NGOs representing women and children is
acknowledged

Government incurs the majority of the costs related to

domestic violence and these are costs to the police, cost of
welfare, cost of medical treatment and prison services.

Families also bear some legal costs, medical costs

Other employees bear the costs when a colleague is absent

Other members of the society bear this costs through

increased taxation to support government support services
to the victims of domestic violence

Introduction
Definition of Domestic violence
Statistics on domestic violence
The nature and incidence of economic
costs
Measuring the costs of domestic violence
Concluding Comments

Direct, Indirect Costs and Opportunity costs

Direct- reduction in output, low productivity,
costs to the police, cost of welfare, cost of
medical treatment, legal costs
Indirect Costs- Social costs- children are
often affected- miss schools, community
tasks may be affected etc.
Opportunity Costs-Alternatives forgone as a
result of violence

It is difficult to quantify costs. We need good records

and statistics on domestic violence.
RBF (2002) estimated the costs of violence against
women for Fiji based on the model used to quantify
the costs of domestic violence in New Zealand in 1994.
3 stages involved the economic costs of those who did
not acknowledge that they were victims of domestic
violence, those that did acknowledge and records were
available and those that suffered violence before but
are now recovering and trying to move on.

21/03/2016

RBF(2002)
Women
Inpopulation
Inpaidemployment
Domesticduty
Unemploymentrate
Violenceprevelencerate
Femalepopulation(15+)
Violenceaffected

Prasad(2011)

50%
39%
42%
7.80%
14%
250000
36000

50%
33%
49%
12.90%
18%
330000
60000

Totaldirectcost

97m

240m

Totalgovt.cost
TotalCost
RatioofrealGDP

200m
300m
7%

498m
740m
6.6%

Improve statistics on violence

More detailed study on the costs and this
could be done for other PICs
Reduction in domestic violence can lead to
economic and social prosperity
Governments in PICs should increase
outlays to address the causes of domestic
violence