Terrorism, Public Expenditure, and Trade Policy: A Theoretical Inquiry

Abstract

Abstract Evidences show that the annual total of all incidents along with the number of bombing incidents steadily rose through the late 1970s and began a steady decline in the early 1990s. Before the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, the motivation of transnational terrorism was primarily nationalism, separatism, Marxist ideology, and nihilism. The jump in the number of incidents in the early 1980s corresponded to the rise of religious-based fundamentalism. The downward trend in the early 1990s is attributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. A surge in religious fervor and the hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan account for the prevailing high levels of transnational terrorism. Terrorism surely affects the economy as a whole both in terms of domestic and international trade-related parameters. In this chapter we have used a general equilibrium trade model with special emphasis on terrorism activities to capture the impact of international trade on the production system of the assumed stylized developing economy. In this connection, the presence of defense sector dualism to control or defend the domestic economy has been considered from the perspective of terrorism attack, thereby helping to relate defense, terrorism, and trade within a single framework. Apart from these, the terrorism augmented welfare aspect of the said developing economy has also been introduced in this chapter. Overall, we have claimed that the gains from trade in the presence of terrorism augmented externality exclusively depend on the pattern of trade.