What Homophobia Costs a Country’s Economy
by Mercy
The economic cost of homophobia, particularly for countries in the global south, is becoming increasingly clear, according to a panel
that spoke at the World Bank on Wednesday. While the continuing
invisibility of gays and lesbians means that it's difficult to get the
numbers for a wide-reaching study, the economic cost of homophobia
ranges from about 0.1 of a percent to 1.7 percent of GDP, according to
Dr. M. V. Lee Badgett, an economics professor at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. In India, where Badgett conducted a case study,
the numbers can be narrowed down to 0.1 to 0.7 percent of GDP. For the
world's LGBT population, homophobia can lead to loss of employment,
workplace or educational discrimination, poor health, and poverty.
Speaking
before a panel of experts and professors in the gender and development
fields at the World Bank, Fabrice Houdart, president of World Bank
GLOBE, an LGBT resource group for employees at the organization, called
discrimination a “significant, self-inflicted economic wound.”
There
are 77 countries that criminalize homophobia, according to the United
Nations; seven of those implement the death penalty. Russia has recently
been in the spotlight for its anti-gay laws, and Uganda’s anti-gay bill
has been widely covered, as has the fact that American evangelical activism
was an influence in the decision to harshly punish gay Ugandans. A
proposed anti-gay law in Arizona was struck down by Gov. Jan Brewer in
February, but a previous discriminatory bill that targeted undocumented
immigrants cost the state $140 million in revenue.
Ethiopia is another nation where homosexuality is a crime, often with devastating consequences. Today in The Boston Globe,
Maria Sacchetti wrote about a 19-year-old Ethiopian man who is facing
deportation in Boston after losing his student visa, but who maintains
that his life would be put in jeopardy if sent back home. The State
Department said that gays in Ethiopia face jail time, abuse and
interrogation.
While
discrimination takes its toll on the individual, in the form of
personal attacks or loss of wages, Badgett says that the combined
effects of homophobia will manifest into the broader economic
climate. “Individual effects [of homophobia] will translate into
important economic outputs,” Badgett said, causing lower rates of
education, poor health, and poverty, which in turn leads to a lower
labor force and high health care costs.
Badgett’s
case study of India also highlighted the enormous cost of health care
due to homophobia in that country. HIV disparity, depression, and
suicide, three health issues that are particularly high among the LGBT
population, cost India between $712 million and $23.1 billion in 2012,
according to Badgett’s study. “You reduce GDP by this much, you call
that a recession, actually,” Bagdett said.
“It’s only the beginning, it’s a small study and we’re hoping it opens up the door to much more work,” Houdart said.
The
panel also spoke about enormous amount of data now available to bridge
the severe gap for LGBT knowledge that prevents significant research
from being done. Dr. Qing Wu, a senior economic analyst at Google, mined
various, and somewhat unorthodox, sources for data, including Google
queries for gay porn and Craigslist ads alongside the traditional Gallup
poll.
A
Gallup poll found around 3.5 percent of American identify as gay, but
an independent study by Wu, in which he asked other questions, like
whether or not they were openly gay at work or school, found that 5.7
percent identified as LGBT. Wu also calculated the percentage of gay
porn queries out of all porn queries, which arguably gives a greater
insight into the lives of others than a phone survey ever could. Qing
joked that “you can lie about yourself, but god knows what you’ve been
doing on the internet.”
“We
know, but we don’t know who you are,” Wu said. He also found that the
gay population is fairly uniform across all states, and that the porn
data shows “that a lot of people are in the closet.” Central America had
the highest rates of gay porn queries, with 8 percent of the total porn
searches in the region.
Another
look into Google queries in the United States shows areas — primarily
the South — where sin is still correlated with homosexuality, and where
it seems closeted gay men are more likely to be married to straight
women. More people are googling "is my husband gay" in Montana than any
other state.
Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group, recently argued in The Washington Post, “Institutionalized
discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread
discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that
when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully
participating in the workforce, economies suffer.”
Source: http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/03/what-homophobia-costs-countrys-economy/359109/
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