This is the twentieth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, looking at whether poverty or poor education causes terrorism. The conventional wisdom, supported by a book by Alan Krueger, is that they do not. The lecture presents four studies. Of those, one study (Krueger) makes the argument that they do not (see pages 4-5), while three of the studies (Enders and Hoover, de Mesquita, and Benmelech) find a limited association (see pages 6-14, 15 and page 21 ). Some of these other three studies have to work pretty hard to make their point. One is left to conclude that while poverty may have some impact on degree of terrorism and recruitment of terrorists, it is probably not the main or determining factor. We probably need to look elsewhere for the root causes.
The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2020.pdf