Trade and terrorism

Abstract

We construct a model of the consequences of terrorism on trade, where firms in trading nations face different costs arising from domestic and transnational terrorism. Using a dyadic dataset in a gravity model, we test terrorism’s effects on overall trade, exports, and imports, while allowing for disaggregation by primary commodities and manufactured goods. While domestic and transnational terrorism have marginal or no significant influence on the overall trade of primary products, both types of terrorism significantly reduce the overall trade of manufactured goods. This novel finding for a global sample indicates the avenue by which terrorism reduces trade and suggests why previous global studies that looked at all trade generally found modest impacts. Moreover, both domestic and transnational terrorism have a detrimental effect on manufactured imports. The larger apparent reduction for transnational terrorism is not statistically different from that of domestic terrorism. A more mixed picture characterizes the effect of terrorism on exports. Domestic terrorism reduces manufactured exports and increases primary exports, while transnational terrorism reduces primary exports. Placebo tests support our hypothesized causality.