Does disparity in income and consumption ever incite terrorism in Africa?

The dataset is employed to investigate the empirical linkages between inequality and terrorism, by separately regressing income and consumption inequalities on four indicators of terrorism viz: domestic, transnational, uncertain, and total over the period 1980-2012. Employing a negative binomial regression on a panel dataset covering 46 African economies, the following findings are established. First, both income and consumption inequalities are found to exert ameliorating influence on all terrorism measures with the exception of uncertain terrorism whose impact is almost negligible. Second, the quantitative impacts of both income and consumption inequalities wield more statistical influence on transnational terrorism than domestic terrorism. Third, the income inequality exerts more statistical weight on terrorism measures than consumption inequality across the model specifications. Lastly, the non-trivial statistical impacts of confounding variables such as the lagged value of terrorism, surface areas, and conflicts are consistently brought to the fore across the terror models. In line with these empirical outcomes, policy implications and suggestions for further studies are offered.