January 6, 2008
Economic Development and Terrorism
Does Economic Development Reduce Terrorism? Becker
Face-to-face interviews of an apparently random sample of the Pakistani population were conducted in August 2007 for Terror Free Tomorrow, a non-partisan Washington policy organization (www. TerrorFreeTomorrow.org). Those interviewed were asked questions about Al Qaeda and other issues facing Pakistan. The results indicate that more than a third of Pakistanis have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and bin Laden, and that President Musharraf is the least popular political leader in Pakistan. Respondents also have a decidedly unfavorable view of the US-led war on terror, for they believe that its real purpose is to kill Muslims, break Muslim countries, and achieve other related goals. There are many causes of such attitudes, but I want to explore the effects of economic development on the degree of support for terrorism.
Many surveys of populations in poor nations give a distorted picture about attitudes in these countries toward controversial issues because they are confined to urban areas that are safer and more easily accessible, and where inhabitants tend to be more educated and better off economically. By contrast, this survey of Pakistani opinions seems to be a reasonably representative sample of about 1,000 Pakistanis age 18 or older in urban and rural areas in all four provinces of Pakistan. The vast majority of these respondents are married Sunni Muslims who live in towns and villages, and have 10 or less years of schooling. A little less than half are women. Unfortunately, the results so far published from this survey do not separate answers by years of schooling, income, urban-rural location, gender, or other useful personal characteristics.
Pakistan is a very poor nation that is low on international rankings of both per capita income and the extent of economic and political freedoms. According to the World Development Report of the World Bank, Pakistan's purchasing-power-adjusted real per capita income is considerably below India's, and is less than one half of China's. Evidence from changes in other countries that have developed indicates that if Pakistan experienced a prolonged period of rapid economic growth, behavior and attitudes on many issues would change radically, regardless of the fact that it is a Muslim nation in Asia.
Consider what happens to the family in response to economic development. The family organization and structure that are the foundation of traditional societies evolved over hundreds, indeed thousands, of years. Families are by no means the same in different cultures, but in all poorer nations, birth rates are high, and the extended family is usually close. Yet regardless of culture, birth rates greatly decline, and extended families evolve into much greater reliance on the nuclear family, in every country that has experienced sizable economic development. Examples of sharp declines in family size include the Chinese cultures of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China (although birth rates in China were partially forced down by government pressures on families to have only one child). Big declines in fertility also occurred in India, Turkey, and Malaysia ( Malaysian birth rates are still relatively high), Malaysia and Turkey being the main Muslim countries that experienced sizable economic development without having large resources of oil or natural gas. What happened in Malaysia suggests that poor Muslim countries, like Pakistan, or Morocco, or Egypt, would also have rapid falls in birth rates if they managed to have serious economic development.
The power of economic development is also shown by the well-established finding that countries become more democratic when their economies undergo significant development. This finding is illustrated by Taiwan, South Korea, and Chile, all countries that started growing rapidly under non-democratic governments, and evolved into vibrant democracies. China has had significant expansion of civil and economic freedoms since it started developing rapidly in 1980 (about the time when I first visited there, and I was impressed by how restrictive conditions were). I believe China will open up further, and will attain greater political freedom if it continues to grow rapidly. Similar changes toward greater economic, political, and social freedom will take place in Pakistan, Egypt, and other Muslim countries if they too take off economically.
Terrorist groups rely on populations that are sympathetic to their cause to hide and protect their members. They also recruit disaffected youth in significant numbers who are willing to commit suicide to destroy enemies. Just as economic progress greatly affects family structure and the amount of freedom available, it also sharply reduces the willingness of people to hide or otherwise protect terrorists because they have more to lose if they are caught. Although leaders of terrorist organizations usually come from more educated classes, these organizations rely on numerous foot soldiers to do a lot of the dirty work. They are generally recruited from younger and less educated groups. It becomes much harder to recruit many of these soldiers when good jobs are available, especially if these recruits are asked to commit suicide.
To be sure, Al Qaeda and other radical violent groups have attracted members from the richest nations: Great Britain, France, Germany, and even the United States. Certainly in the US and Great Britain, Muslims have been rather well integrated into their economies, and both countries provide very good opportunities for advancement to younger Muslims. For this reason, in both countries, and even in France and Germany, only tiny numbers of their Muslim populations have been recruited to active participation in radical causes.
If better opportunities reduce the attractiveness of suicidal terrorism, how does one explain that all the participants in the 9/11/01 suicide attacks were college-educated Muslims, and generally they were in their late twenties? Posner and I show in a paper on suicide why educated terrorists with good economic opportunities would be unwilling to engage in run of the mill terrorism or ordinary suicide attacks because the cost to them would be too great. Such types can only be attracted to terrorist organizations by influential leadership roles, or by dramatic and exceptional missions, as the 9/11 terrorist mission. That is why the education-age backgrounds of the 9/11 terrorists are the exceptions, not the rule, for the profiles of suicide terrorists. A strong counterexample comes from the backgrounds of suicide bombers during the first Intifada against Israel: they were mainly young and unmarried (the mean age of male bombers was 20), and few had a college education.
Terrorism and Economic Development--Posner's Comment
I agree with Becker's analysis as far as it goes, but I question whether the amount of terrorism is highly sensitive to economic development, to which the "demographic transition"--the well-documented tendency of birth rates (also death rates) to decline sharply when a nation reaches a threshold level of economic development--contributes. When birth and death rates decline, the average age of the population rises, which is a stabilizing force, the number of young men declines, and the economic opportunities of the young are greater because there are fewer young. So the number of potential foot soldiers for terrorism is diminished, as it is by anything that raises the opportunity costs of prospective terrorist recruits. But how important are those opportunity costs to the amount of terrorism?
It is helpful to think of terrorism as of other goods and services in demand and supply terms. There is a demand for terrorism, and a supply of terrorism, and the intersection of demand and supply gives the amount of terrorism. Terrorism is a political phenomenon, and the demand is driven mainly by political grievances, real or imagined. Often the grievances are related to foreign occupation. France in Algeria; the British in Palestine; now the Israelis in the West Bank; the United States in Iraq (and earlier in the Philippines)--though in the case of Islamic terrorism, the major factor seems to be the Western "presence" in the Middle East, rather than foreign occupation; even Israel's occupation of the West Bank seems a subsidiary factor. And the Baader-Meinhoff gang in West Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and Aun Shirikyo in Japan are examples of terrorist groups unrelated to foreign occupation. But it is the existence of grievance that is key, and often--probably typically--the grievance is political rather than economic.
If demand for terrorism is grievance-driven, then one can expect the supply of terrorists to come mainly from the intelligentsia, for the members of the intelligentsia are more likely than ordinary people to be moved by ideas, resentments, and political ambitions rather than by material concerns. They have the leisure and the education to think big thoughts, like overthrowing a government, which rarely brings material improvements.
Nor is it the case that the intelligentsia supplies merely the leaders, who then send their simple-minded followers to destruction. The leaders are at risk themselves; more important, the perpetrators of the actual terrorist attacks tend to be middle class (though the second intifada, mentioned by Becker, may be an exception). From a labor-market standpoint, there are two important tradeoffs in recruiting a supply of terrorists: quality-quantity, and capital-labor, and they are related. Because terrorists tend to be few in number if only because of the need for concealment, and to be operating in a hostile environment, the recruitment of a large number of poorly trained and motivated cannon fodder is unlikely to be optimal; they are likely to give the game away. Moreover, the most effective terrorism requires some technical sophistication (such as piloting an airplane), and this is a further reason for terrorist leaders to recruit high-quality personnel.
The relation of economic development in general or the demographic transition in particular to terrorism is likely to be extremely indirect, and is probably small. If one looks at a list of 195 countries ranked by birth rate, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_birth_rate, one discovers that of the 25 nations with the highest birth rates, all but one (Afghanistan) are in Africa, and Africa has not proved to be a major source of terrorists relative to its vast population. Pakistan has the world's 57th highest birth rate--27.2 per thousand. This is high--replacement is 21; the U.S. birth rate 14; Germany's 8.2--and Pakistan is often used as an illustration of a nation that has not made the demographic transition yet. Saudi Arabia, that cradle of Islamic terrorism, has a lower birth rate--24.2--though it is still high. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia is a relatively wealthy country by international standards; its per capita income is similar to that of Poland and Chile. Algeria, with a birth rate (20.8) considerably below Saudia Arabia's, has a severe terrorism problem. Jordan has a substantially higher birth rate than Algeria (in fact it is only slightly lower than Pakistan's), but is not a hotbed of terrorism.
All this said, there is some negative correlation between birth rates and terrorism in Muslim countries, but it is weak, and probably swamped by other factors. The major factor in Islamic terrorism may have nothing directly to do with economic development or the factors that influence it; it may simply be the influence of extremist Islamic religious beliefs in particular Muslim nations and communities.