Does Terrorism Increase after a Natural Disaster? An Analysis Based Upon Property Damage

Department

Economics, Finance and Quantitative Analysis

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-22-2016

Abstract

Does an emergency such as a natural disaster lead to a surge of terrorism? This paper contributes to the emerging literature on this issue. We consider the experience of 129 countries during the period 1998–2012 to determine the effect of a natural disaster on both domestic as well as transnational terrorism. We also control for endogeneity using expenditure on health care and land area in a country as instruments. In contrast to the existing literature, we measure the extent of terrorism by the value of property damage. The results indicate that after natural disasters, (a) transnational terrorism increases with a lag, and (b) a statistically significant impact on domestic terrorism is not observed.

Journal Title

Defence and Peace Economics

Journal ISSN

1024-2694

First Page

1

Last Page

33

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1080/10242694.2016.1204169

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