| dc.description.abstract | Understanding the links between terrorism and entrepreneurship is crucially important for social scientists. Existing empirical literature offers mixed and inconclusive evidence regarding this connection. This thesis investigates the impact of terrorism on entrepreneurship rates and economic development across diverse countries, using entrepreneurship rates as a key indicator of business formation. Leveraging data from the World Bank Entrepreneurship Surveys and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), I conduct a comprehensive analysis of how terrorism affects business formation and economic growth. Recognizing that economic prosperity underpins entrepreneurial growth, this research examines terrorism's multifaceted influence on entrepreneurship and business activities. The second chapter of the thesis evaluates the influence of terrorist attacks on economic activity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I further examine the sectoral impacts of violent attacks to determine the development and productivity in terms of the number of people employed in these countries. The findings indicate that all types of terrorist attacks exert an influence on overall economic activity in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Also, terrorism, when interacted with inequality, poses a larger threat to the economy. The third chapter examines the impact of terrorism (incidents and killings) on new business formation in a sample of 120 countries. Upon further dividing the country samples into different groups according to their level of development, I find that business formation is most affected in fragile countries. The results are robust to different measures of terrorism, i.e., total terrorism, domestic terrorism, transnational terrorism, and business-related terrorism. The fourth chapter investigates the impact of terrorism on different types of entrepreneurship and uses a semi-parametric approach to identify non-linearities in the relationship. Overall, I find that terrorism is detrimental to entrepreneurship and development in the world's economies. The influence of terrorism is more significant in developing countries due to institutional voids. I find that the results obtained are different for developed, developing, democracies, autocracies, parliamentary, and left-government countries. Also, terrorist attacks that include a significant number of injuries and killings have a slightly more significant impact on business formation. I also conduct robustness checks using various measures of terrorism and entrepreneurship to ensure that my findings remain consistent. Policymakers need to devise strategies to combat terrorism, as it has the potential to damage the business environment, thereby decreasing business start-up rates. | en_US |
