Fighting Terrorism: Are Military Measures Effective? Empirical Evidence From Turkey

The present article aims at investigating the causal relationship between defense spending and terrorism in Turkey using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedure and Granger-causality analysis. The findings reveal that there exists a unidirectional causality running form terrorist attacks to defense spending as expected, but not vice versa. In the light of this finding it can be inferred that military anti-terrorism measures alone are not sufficient to prevent terrorism.