Terrorism and Global Business Performance

This paper contributes to the literature on business performance by investigating the relationship between terrorism and global business performance at country level. A measure of a country’s distance from the frontier score of the World Bank’s Doing Business index is used to proxy for business performance. The results of the fixed-effects estimations based on 173 countries over seven years (2009–2017) show that terrorism has no significant relationship with global business performance. We then partition our sample into developed, developing and fragile countries. The results still show that there is no robust significant relationship between terrorism and business performance for the sub-samples of developed and developing countries. However, the results based on the fragile countries’ sub-sample suggest a significant negative relationship between terrorism and business performance. The results are consistent with an alternative measure of business performance and estimation technique that controls for endogeneity.