Global Terrorism Index
The index provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism since 2000.
The index combines a number of factors associated with terrorist attacks to build an explicit picture of the impact of terrorism, illustrating trends, and providing a data series for analysis by researchers and policymakers.
It produces a composite score in order to provide an ordinal ranking of countries on the impact of terrorism.
The aim is to examine trends and to help inform a positive and practical debate about the future of terrorism and the required policy responses.
The GTI therefore defines terrorism as "the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a state and non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation".
[2] This definition recognises that terrorism is not only the physical act of an attack, but also the psychological impact it has on a society for many years after.
A great majority of incidents are coded in the GTD as an 'unknown' level of property damage, thus scoring nil, with 'catastrophic' events being extremely rare.
To assign a relative number to how a country has been directly impacted by terrorism in any given year, for every incident recorded, the GTI calculates a weighted sum of all indicators.
To illustrate, the table below depicts a hypothetical country's score for a given year: A five-year weighted average is applied to reflect the lingering psychological effect of terrorist acts over time.
The direct costs include those borne by the victim of the terrorist act and associated expenditure, such as medical spending.
The indirect costs include lost productivity and earning as well as the psychological trauma to the victims, their families and friends.
The analysis presents conservative estimates of the economic impact of terrorism and does not include variables for which detailed appropriate data was not available.
The first large increase in the economic impact of terrorism happened in 2001, when the attacks of September 11 in New York City and Washington, D.C., took place.
The 2007 increase is mainly attributed to al-Qa'ida affiliated terrorist groups and coincided with the coalition troop surge in Iraq.
[8] The Institute for Economics and Peace has published nine editions of the Global Terrorism Index to date.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, and Pakistan remain the top five countries most affected by terrorism.
Attacks in OECD countries have shifted tactics since 2014 to utilize simpler methods against non-traditional targets.
Conversely, in OECD member countries, deaths from terrorism dramatically increased in 2015, rising by 650 per cent when compared to 2014.
Twenty-one of the 34 OECD countries experienced at least one terrorist attack with the majority of deaths occurring in Turkey and France.
Of attacks conducted in the United States, 98 per cent were carried out by lone actors, resulting in 156 deaths.
The countries most heavily affected by terrorism in 2014 were, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria.
From 2000 to 2013 there was a five-fold increase in the number of people killed by terrorism, resulting in approximately 18,000 deaths.
The countries most heavily affected by terrorism in 2013 were, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.
Four terrorist groups, ISIL, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qa'ida, claimed 66 per cent of deaths in 2013.
The 2012 report found that the global impact of terrorism increased significantly from 2002 to 2007, reaching its peak in 2007, and subsequently plateauing.
The biggest rise took place over the period from 2005 to 2007 when the majority of the global increase in terrorism was driven by events in Iraq.
Four other countries also significantly contributed to the global rise with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines all experiencing increases, especially between 2007 and 2009.
