Natural Resource Rents, Inequality, and Terrorism in Africa

This study examines the impact of natural resource rents on terrorism via inequality channel in 34 African economies, straddling the period 1980–2012. This study employs a negative binomial regression, in which the following findings are established: first, the unconditional impact of natural resource rents on terrorism is found to be positive across the model specifications, particularly when Gini and Theil indices are controlled for. Second, inequality has no discernable first-order impact on terrorism across the board. Third, the marginal impacts of interactions between inequality measures, specifically Gini and Theil coefficients and total natural resource rents on terrorism are significantly negative. Four, the corresponding net effects of interactions between natural resource rents and inequality (Gini and Theil coefficients) on terrorism are positive, thus lending support to earlier submission of involving all constitutive variables in the specifications for the parameters to make economic sense. The results are robust to accounting for fixed and country effects using the Poisson Pseudo maximum likelihood high-dimension fixed effects estimator. On the policy front, maintaining fairness and equity in the distribution of rents from the ‘free gifts of nature’ remains a veritable policy menu, especially for the resource-rich economies, to counteracting terrorist activities.