How does terrorism measurement matter of state-level of a country? Evidence from Islamic countries

Abstract

This study attempts to measure the intensity of terrorism in the provinces level of the Islamic economies. The main idea of this study is to quantify the terrorism score at the state level of Islamic countries to gauge the terrorism intensity of that particular state in a particular period of time for that economy. The intuition is based on the logic that the economic cost and intensity terrorism is not uniform within a country. Some areas may have more intensity of terrorism than others in the same territory of a country. The application of the TEIE index (Khan and Yusof in Qual Quant, 2016b. doi: 10.1007/s11135-016-0336-z ) to Islamic countries (Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria) of the provinces/states confirms that terrorism intensity to measure economic cost is not uniform in the provinces of Islamic countries and it also confirms that geographical dimensions of terrorism are heterogeneous with in one country. Terrorism intensity fluctuates across the provinces of the Islamic countries. The idea of this research study gives a more realistic approach to the policy makers for the curb of terrorism. Anti-terrorism one-fit policy within one country is not appropriate and should be decentralized according to the magnitude of terrorism score at the state level. Furthermore, this study is not only useful for the information of terrorism score of a particular state, but at the same time, it is very important from economic perspective to utilize the scare resource for terrorism measures according to the intensity of terrorism of a state of an economy.