Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism

Alberto Abadie

No 10859, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This article provides an empirical investigation of the determinants of terrorism at the country level. In contrast with the previous literature on this subject, which focuses on transnational terrorism only, I use a new measure of terrorism that encompasses both domestic and transnational terrorism. In line with the results of some recent studies, this article shows that terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries, once the effects of other country-specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account. Political freedom is shown to explain terrorism, but it does so in a non-monotonic way: countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes. This result suggests that, as experienced recently in Iraq and previously in Spain and Russia, transitions from an authoritarian regime to a democracy may be accompanied by temporary increases in terrorism. Finally, the results suggest that geographic factors are important to sustain terrorist activities.

JEL-codes: D74 H56 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law, nep-ltv and nep-pol
Note: LE PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Published as Abadie, Alberto. "Poverty, Political Freedom, And The Roots Of Terrorism," American Economic Review, 2005, v95(4,Sep), 50-56.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10859.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism (2006)
Working Paper: Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10859

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10859

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().