Terrorism and Country-Level Global Business Failure

This paper contributes to the literature on business failure by investigating the relationship between terrorism and country-level global business failure. A sample of 174 countries over the period 2009–2015 was used. To proxy for business failure, a resolving insolvency index which is a component of the World Bank’s Doing Business index was used. The results of the fixed-effects estimations show that terrorism has a negative and significant relationship with business failure for the full sample. When the sample is divided into developed, developing and fragile states the results show that terrorism is negatively and significantly associated with business failure in developing and fragile states only. The marginal effects of the interactions show that an increase in terrorist incidents by 100 will reduce business failure in South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) countries by 1% and 0.7% points, respectively. There are also relationships between our control variables relating to measures of financial development and business failure. These findings contribute to our understanding of the effects of terrorism on business failure and how this differs depending on whether the country is developing, developed, or a fragile state