13 Direct cost estimates are especially problematic in a developing country context: lack of availability of services or serious under-funding of services means that direct costs associated with GBV will be low—perhaps giving the mistaken impression that that the problem is not important when in fact prevalence rates may be quite high. If estimates of direct costs of GBV are not particularly useful in a developing country context, what options are left to document the socioeconomic costs of GBV? One option is to concentrate on estimating indirect costs.

Indirect cost estimates have focused on: (i) foregone earnings due to death and lost productivity (CDC, 2003); (ii) job loss, lost productivity of the women, lost productivity of the abuser due to incarceration, and mortality (Laurence and Spalter-Roth, 1995); (iii) loss of tax revenues due to death and incarceration (Greaves et al., 1995); and (iv) reduced earnings of women (Morrison and Orlando, 1999; Sánchez et al. 2004). By estimating earnings equations of the determinants of women ́s earnings, Morrison and Orlando (1999) find that lost wages due to family violence amounted to 1.6 and 2.0% of GDP in Nicaragua and Chile, respectively. Using a non-parametric matching methodology on DHS data from 1995, Sánchez et al. (2004), find that Colombian women who suffer physical violence have 14% lower earnings than women who do not suffer violence; using more recent data from 2003, they estimate that the wage loss due to family violence was equivalent to 0.85% of 2003 GDP.<sup>16</sup> While the indirect costing approach offers more methodological rigor and perhaps better precision in the estimation of the labor market impacts of violence, it is subject to one of the same criticisms leveled at the accounting approach: important categories of costs are not examined—although in this case the methodology makes no claim of producing a comprehensive estimate of the costs of GBV.

Another option for estimating the socioeconomic costs associated with GBV—and one frequently employed by economists to establish the market value of non-market goods—is to estimate the willingness of individuals (and by extension society) to pay for lives free of GBV. This approach has the advantage of producing a comprehensive estimate of the cost of GBV in a specific locale. The approach, however, has been used only very infrequently to gauge the welfare loss occasioned by GBV (see Sorenson (2003) for one of the few examples), presumably for two reasons. First, as the CEDAW and Belém do Pará conventions make explicit, living lives free of violence is a human right; estimating the willingness to pay for a right—while demonstrating the importance society attaches to an issue—may itself be controversial. A second unattractive feature of willingness to pay estimates is that they are sensitive to income levels and income distribution.

A final option for estimating the socioeconomic costs of GBV it to use the metric of disability adjusted life years (DALYs) lost to GBV. DALYs have the great advantage of including years lost due not only to premature mortality, but also due to disability or illness;

> 16 The matching methodology estimates a reduced form equation for the determinants of the probability of suffering violence; it then matches women who suffered violence with those who did not, but had a similar “a priori” probability of having done so.  Determinants of violence included in this regression were age, marital status, education level, and many others.