Growth Consequences of Terrorism in Western Europe

This paper presents panel estimates for 18 Western Europe countries to ascertain the separate impacts of domestic and transnational terrorism on income per capita growth for 1971–2004. The paper merges domestic and transnational terrorist events in order to attribute growth impacts to the two broad categories of terrorism. Each additional transnational terrorist incident per million persons reduces economic growth by about 0.4 percentage points. Domestic terrorism has a much smaller effect on growth that is about half this size. Terrorism's negative impact on growth is related to the scale of terrorism in the sample countries in order to give a better idea of what is the average consequence in most sample countries. These negative impacts are shown to stem from domestic and transnational terrorism's adverse influence on investment shares. Counterterrorism efforts also augment government spending, which crowds out growth‐promoting investment. We show that the pathway by which domestic and transnational terrorism influences growth differs. For example, transnational terrorism works more through the crowding out of investment, while domestic terrorism works more through the increase in government expenditure increases. A host of sensitivity tests are performed to support our empirical model. Policy recommendations conclude the paper – e.g., measures to curb transnational terrorist attacks have a higher economic payoff than similar measures to reduce domestic terrorist events. Since transnational terrorism has a larger impact on income per capita growth than does domestic terrorism, West European efforts to curb transnational terrorism will have a greater economic dividend than efforts to limit domestic terrorism.