A new study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Rutgers University and Leiden Law School found that the addition of one right for LGB people is associated with an increase of over $2000 in GDP per capita. Researchers used 45 years of legal and economic data from 132 countries to complete the analysis.
“All over the world LGBT people face discrimination in the labor market, harassment and bullying in education and stresses that harm their health. This treatment diminishes their ability to contribute to the economy, and the economy suffers when countries fail to recognize their rights,” said lead author M.V. Lee Badgett, professor of economics and public policy at UMass Amherst and distinguished scholar at the UCLA Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy.
While the researchers hypothesize that the analysis would be representative of the impact of LGBT+ inclusion generally, they were not able to obtain multi-year datasets for transgender people in many of the countries studied.
Read more at Phys.org.