Poverty does not provoke terrorism, as three experts show

The received wisdom says terrorism is linked to poverty and that, to root out terrorism, we must eradicate poverty first. Development agencies, anti-poverty activists, the former World Bank president James Wolfensohn and politicians such as George W Bush have all called for effort to reduce poverty so that terrorism can't win. This bogus view is blown apart by the Princeton economist Alan B Krueger and Jitka Malecková of Charles University in Prague who ask, in their paper "Education, Poverty and Terrorism", first published in 2002, if there is a causal link between these things. Their conclusion: the connection, if any, is at best indirect, usually complicated, and probably quite weak.

Opinion polls among Palestinians that Krueger and Malecková have pored over show strong support for attacks against Israeli targets when those polled are students, merchants and professionals. When unemployed people are interviewed, the support for terrorism declines significantly. Reacting to last month's failed plots in the UK, Krueger told the Wall Street Journal: "Each time we have one of these attacks and the backgrounds of the attackers are revealed, this should put to rest the myth that terrorists are attacking us because they are desperately poor. But this misconception doesn't die."

An analysis of Hezbollah activists in Lebanon also showed that its recruits typically lived above the poverty line and had higher education. Extremist Israeli Jewish-settler members of Gush Emunim had similar profiles. So what causes terror? Nasra Hassan, a UN official, interviewed extremist Palestinian youths and in "An Arsenal of Believers" - an extraordinary essay in the New Yorker in 2001 - she listed indignity, political humiliation and desperation born out of a sense of futility as possible explanations of terrorism.

Indeed, when Krueger examined 781 terrorist incidents the US state department deemed "significant", he found that the attackers were from countries with political oppression, not poverty. Some 15 of the 19 hijackers on 11 September 2001 came from wealthy families in a prosperous country - Saudi Arabia. Osama Bin Laden's background was famously opulent; his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri is an affluent paediatrician.

Not only is it mindlessly reductive to say that the poor will turn to terrorism, it also profoundly insults them. There is enough misery in their lives: let us not brand them potential terrorists. The poorest countries, such as Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Eri trea and Liberia, have all experienced vicious conflict, not terror. As an academic, Krueger is tentative about the real cause. When pressed, he says that when people cannot oppose policies peacefully, and cannot assume that their views would be heard, they may turn to violence.

There are many good reasons to eliminate poverty. But we should not expect terrorism to decline as a result.

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