Gender Gap in Physical Activity: The Role of Conflicts and Political Instability

This article takes as its starting point the warnings issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the perverse effects of a sedentary lifestyle on people’s health, resulting in additional health expenditure that diverts significant resources away from other areas of public spending. The research aims to empirically verify whether intra- and inter-state conflicts and political instability are associated with less active lifestyles among citizens, and whether sedentary lifestyles exacerbated by violent contexts have a different impact on men and women. The analysis is conducted by cross-referencing data on physical inactivity fromWHOand data about ongoing conflicts and political instability in 192 countries from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) for the period 2000–2022. Despite the limitations due to the macroeconomic nature of the data compared to the microeconomic theoretical framework and the sensitivity of the results due to the introduction of education variables that distort the sample by reducing the amount of data for the poorest countries, our analysis showed a statistically significant negative association between the presence of inter- or intra-state conflicts and/or political instability, and physical activity. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the negative effects of the presence of conflict contexts on physical activity are not distributed evenly between men and women, being more intense for the latter. To our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to verify, at the macroeconomic level, the effect of violence and instability on physical inactivity. The shift from a microeconomic approach to macroeconomic analysis represents the main limitation of this study, but it nevertheless is a first attempt to verify how contexts pervaded by violence can generate less healthy lifestyles and how these can, albeit only in part, explain gender differences in sedentary behavior.