International trade impediments in Africa: is terrorism also in the dock?

Abstract Despite the abundant literature on the consequences of terrorism, little is known about the relationship between terrorism and international trade, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The purpose of this article is to fill this literature gap by assessing how terrorism affects international trade using a panel data of 24 countries over the period 2000–2020. This article applies different techniques such as ordinary least squares, fixed effects, Quantile Regression and the System Generalised Method of Moments. The results show that terrorism is an important determinant of international trade in SSA. Across a number of specifications, the results reveal that terrorism is also guilty of trade delay. Furthermore, the results show that governance is a potential channel through which terrorism transits to exert its harmful effect on international trade in SSA countries.