Sajad Delavari - Health Human Resources Research Center, School of Management & Information Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran
Mohsen Bayati - Health Human Resources Research Center, School of Management & Information Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran
Farhad Lofti - Health Human Resources Research Center, School of Management & Information Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran
Khosro Keshavarz - Health Human Resources Research Center, School of Management & Information Sciences, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran
Somayeh Delavari - Center for Educational Research in Medical Sciences, School of Medicine, Department of Medical Education, School of Medicine, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Background: Preventing violence is important especially inMiddle East, which many of its countries are struggling withviolence. Violence and war could be affected by several factors.Health as a Socio-economic factor could be one of the predictorsof violence. Knowing affecting factors could help public policymakers to decrease violence level. Thus this study is aimed toanalyze health and other socio-economic factors that could affectinterpersonal violence in middle eastern countries.Methods: Panel data of Middle Eastern countries from 1990 to2016 on prevalence of interpersonal violence as dependentvariable and per capita income, life expectancy, democracy index,urbanization and unemployment as explanatory factors werecollected from international organization databases. Several paneldata diagnostic tests were performed for selecting suitable modelof estimation. The variables were interred in the model aslogarithmic form. Because of heteroscedasticity, cross sectionaldependence and serial correlation of residuals, FeasibleGeneralized Least Squares (FGLS) was used for estimation ofmentioned model by Stata 14.2.Findings: The mean of interpersonal violence prevalence and lifeexpectancy were 2462.2 (SD=232.4) per 100,000 populations and73.5 (SD=4.5) in Middle East, respectively. Based on results, urbanization (β=-0.0925, P<0.01), life expectancy (β=-0.0362,P<0.01), per capita income (β=-0.0046, P<0.01), unemployment(β=0.0007, P<0.01) and democracy (β=-5.83e-06, P<0.01) hadsignificant relation with on interpersonal violence in Middle East.Discussion: Life expectancy as a proxy for health is one of themain predictors interpersonal violence. As literature support, thelife expectancy could be one of the more relating factors withinterpersonal violence. That is, if a society be healthier, theburden of interpersonal violence will be lower. Thus health policymakers should consider health facilities as a preventive factors ofviolence, which is stated in health as a bridge for peace by theworld health organization.

Health, Life Expectancy, Violence, Socioeconomic Factors