Asymmetric impact of human development index on terrorism in Pakistan: New findings from QARDL

Pakistan has consistently ranked among the top ten nations most affected by terrorism over the past decade, while also being recognized as having a relatively low level of human development globally. In an effort to identify measures to lessen the threat of terrorism, this study simulates the asymmetric short- and long-term effects of the human development index, inflation, economic growth, and unemployment on terrorism. This is done by employing quarterly data from 1990 Q1 to 2020 Q4 in a novel quantile auto-regressive distributed lag (QARDL) model. Both the estimated result of the QARDL model and the corresponding Wald test result reveal the existence of long-term and short-term asymmetric relationships between human capital development and unemployment in incidents of terrorism, unlike the inflation rate and the gross domestic product, which lead to symmetric relationships. Moreover, the estimated long-term results of symmetric and asymmetric ARDL show that lower human capital development, inflation rate, sluggish economic growth, and soaring unemployment are major causes of terrorism in Pakistan. These new findings will allow government regulators and policymakers to control inflation, improve employment opportunities, and enhance the human development index so as to mitigate terrorism.