Sunday, August 7

Socio Economic factors determine terrorism

This is interesting because it seems to give evidence that socio economic factors do have an impact on terrorism.

Prior research has concluded that socio-economic development does not significantly affect terrorism. We take an alternative view. First, we note that a country's socio-economic circumstances affect terrorists’ behavior through terrorism's opportunity costs. We argue that this reasoning also holds in the case of supreme value terrorism. Then, we employ a series of negative binomial regressions for 110 countries between 1971 and 2007 to test the hypothesis that poor socio-economic development is conducive to terrorism. We find that socio-economic variables indeed matter to terrorism, contrary to other results. Our findings imply that countries can benefit from economic development and growth in terms of a reduction in terrorism.

This is, of course, quite high level and when reduced down to specifics, can have difficult results. For example, most of the high profile terrorism is in pretty rich countries (Norway or USA or Saudi Arabia), regions (Punjab in India). So one needs to think more about this.

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