I thought it would be interesting to compare countries' rankings on the GPI to their standings on a number of other economic, social, and demographic factors. With the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, we ran the numbers and generated a series of scattergraphs, plotting GPI against these other metrics. Our analysis only covers approximately 75-80 countries due to data availability. Also note that the higher the GPI score, the less peaceful a country is. Though we found strong associations between a country's prosperity and its GPI, we can't say for certain whether peace promotes prosperity or prosperity promotes peace—or whether other factors that we haven't considered play an equal or greater role. But the patterns that come up are intriguing enough to report here.



Generally speaking, peace follows the level of economic development. A large number of affluent, advanced nations - Norway, Canada, Denmark, Japan and New Zealand—are among the most peaceful in the world. The GPI is strongly associated with the level of economic development (a correlation of -.6—recall that the higher the GPI is, the less peaceful a nation is, hence the negative correlation). There are also quite a few outliers, Russia, Israel and the United States among them. Great powers, economically dominant countries like the US today or the UK in the past, have also always developed large militaries. So have their rivals, like the USSR during the Cold War, or France and Germany on the continent during the days when England reigned supreme.



Peace is also a product of the type of development, not just its level. The apex of economic development has shifted from resource extraction and manufacturing economies, with their large working classes, to more highly-educated and idea-driven post-industrial knowledge economies.

The GPI is closely associated with the share of workers in professional, technical and creative fields (-.48) and also with human capital (-.45, see also the scatter-graph above). Russia, Israel and Pakistan are extreme outliers.



It almost goes without saying that peaceful countries have higher levels of happiness and well-being. When people don't have to worry about sending their children off to war, being invaded by enemy armies, or terrorists with suicide bombs, they naturally experience higher levels of life satisfaction. So it's not surprising that the two are closely associated statistically, with a correlation of -.52 (once again, remember that a higher GPI score reflects a lower level of peace, hence the negative correlation). The US is again something of an outlier here, situated near Mexico and Saudi Arabia—nations with significantly higher levels of well-being than their GPI scores might predict. Israel, Russia and Pakistan remain the extreme outliers.