The Brazil Program at the Inter-American Dialogue has launched Economic Costs of Crime in Brazil, a new project dedicated to quantifying the full economic costs of crime in the country. The project will be led by newly appointed senior fellow Carlos Góes and provides a comprehensive accounting of expenditures related to public security, private security, insurance and material losses, judicial costs, loss of productive capacity, incarceration, and medical services.
Building on a methodology originally developed by Brazil’s Office of the President in 2015, which estimated the annual cost of crime at 4.38 percent of the country’s GDP, the project will estimate annual costs across two decades, from 2005 through 2025. The work will result in a bilingual publication and a launch event in Washington, DC, in the second semester of 2026, bringing renewed attention to the economic impact of crime in Brazil during an important electoral cycle.
Carlos Góes is an economist at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group and a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Economics at George Washington University. He is also a Partner Scholar at the Globalization and Prosperity Lab at the University of California San Diego.
For more information about how to partner with the Brazil Program and access our briefings, events, and publications, please contact Giulia Branco Spiess at gbrancospiess@thedialogue.org.
FROM OUR EXPERTS
How does quantifying the full economic cost of crime change the way we think about growth, fiscal sustainability, and state capacity in Brazil—and why is updating this accounting for the 2005–2025 period particularly important?
Bruna Santos, director of the Brazil Program at the Inter-American Dialogue:
Quantifying the full economic cost of crime reframes violence as a macroeconomic constraint rather than a problem confined to public security. Once the full basket of costs is considered, crime can be understood as a shadow tax on the economy, diverting resources away from productive investment toward protection, remediation, and risk management.
Evidence shows that spending on public order and safety is not marginal, a fact with direct implications for fiscal prioritization. More fundamentally, measuring the costs shifts the analytical question from how much is spent to what return is generated on each dollar allocated, emphasizing the need to minimize the total social cost of crime rather than simply expanding budgetary commitments. Security budgets tend to be fiscally “sticky,” creating long-term obligations that crowd out productive investments in infrastructure and education, for example.
From a state capacity perspective, full-cost accounting operationalizes capacity as a measurable gap between what the state is expected to deliver, security, law enforcement, and a predictable business environment, and what households and firms are privately substituting when those functions are not fully met. High levels of private security expenditure and risk mitigation reflect institutional shortfalls and reinforce inequality, as protection becomes unevenly distributed across regions and income groups. In this sense, crime also intersects with legitimacy. Persistent insecurity erodes trust and governance performance, transforming delivery failures into cumulative constraints rather than isolated events.
Updating this accounting for the 2005–2025 period is particularly consequential. The timeframe captures multiple economic and security regimes, including Brazil’s commodity boom, subsequent recession and fiscal crisis, pandemic shock, and evolving criminal dynamics. I expect the report to enable analysts to disentangle structural trends from cyclical fluctuations and assess policy effectiveness across distinct macro contexts.
Carlos Góes, senior fellow of the Brazil Program at the Inter-American Dialogue:
It is easy to see that crime is a major problem in Brazil. Polls show that most Brazilians recognize this. What is harder to see is what the country could achieve if it did not face these challenges.
Looking at the costs of crime helps reveal what we usually overlook. What else could society do if it did not have to spend so much on private security, high insurance premiums, or an overburdened criminal justice system? How much more could the economy produce if it did not lose so many lives to violence? How many more people could receive care if the healthcare system faced a lighter burden?
Older estimates suggest that the economic costs of crime in Brazil exceed 4 percent of GDP, roughly the same amount the country spends on its entire public education system.
As Brazil approaches the 2026 elections, how can a comprehensive and updated accounting of the economic costs of crime reshape the public debate on security policy and candidate proposals? What structural challenges do the data tend to expose?
Bruna Santos, director of the Brazil Program at the Inter-American Dialogue:
A comprehensive and updated accounting of the economic costs of crime introduces empirical discipline into a policy arena often shaped by ideology, polarization, and symbolic politics. As Brazil elections, this evidence can reshape candidate proposals by reframing security as a macroeconomic and fiscal issue while simultaneously exposing persistent structural weaknesses in state capacity. The data complicates simplified narratives and reinforces the view that economic recovery is inseparable from improved security governance. In a context of fiscal rigidity and uneven subnational capacity, updated estimates also push proposals toward efficiency, coordination, and resource reallocation rather than large spending expansions.
Carlos Góes, senior fellow of the Brazil Program at the Inter-American Dialogue:
Homicides decreased quite a lot in most of Brazil since 2017. Property crimes by and large also decrease. Most people have not adjusted the mental picture they have of Brazil.
Additionally, we also have no clear picture of what happened at the same time: did the decrease in homicides coincide with more or less law enforcement expenditures? What about private security? What happened with the prison population and expenditures?
Even well intentioned leaders would not design a good policy if they are ill informed. This is all but guaranteed to be one of the main topics during this year’s election, so hopefully it can inform the debate.
