DALLAS, March 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, redefined its mission after 9/11 by committing resources to combating terrorism -- and that effort appears to be paying off in a big way, UT Dallas researcher Dr. Todd Sandler says.
"According to calculations, Interpol gets $200 in gain for every $1 it spends on the fight against terrorism," said Sandler, the Vibhooti Shukla professor of economics and political economy in UT Dallas' School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. "That's a big payback."
These findings could affect how individual governments evaluate the return on investment for their own anti-terrorist programs and may encourage greater intelligence cooperation among nations, he said.
The study was written jointly with Dr. Daniel G. Arce, professor of economics at UT Dallas, and Dr. Walter Enders, professor of economics at the University of Alabama, and is scheduled to be published in the Journal of Law and Economics in February 2011.
The project looked at anti-terrorism activities within Interpol. The authors gained unprecedented access to the agency's records and used that data to determine how much money had been devoted to terrorism projects and how successful such efforts were.
Interpol's budgets for anti-terrorist efforts in 2006 and 2007 were $14 million and $17 million, respectively. If the average cost of a terrorist act is $5 million, then the agency needed to prevent only four acts during 2007 to more than pay back the budget cost. Arrests that occurred in cooperation with Interpol far exceeded that number, though the data doesn't reveal whether any of those arrests would have been made without Interpol's cooperation.
The authors' research looked at the number of arrests based on notices by Interpol, as well as detentions tied to the diffusion of information from one country to another, via Interpol. "Many terrorists enter countries on stolen or altered documents," Sandler said. Passports at airports and other entry points now can be screened by a high-tech Interpol system based in France, so it's much harder for would-be terrorists to pass through with bogus documents.
The research was funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and was not paid for by Interpol.
In the authors' earlier research, they found individual governments tended to get less impressive returns on their terrorism-fighting investments. A 2008 project found that increasing homeland security worldwide by 25 percent resulted in a payback of about 30 cents on a dollar. Increased offensive measures such as those taken against the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11 offered a payback of 8 to 12 cents on the dollar.
Interpol's cooperative-based proactive measures leading to the arrest of terrorists or prevention of movement among countries also do not have the same potential for backlash attacks that military actions sometimes spur. "Our findings, taken together, could say a lot to members of Congress as they consider how they should allocate funds for fighting terrorism," Sandler said.
"Quite simply, Interpol presents large paybacks on small expenditures as it addresses the shortfall of collective proactive measures," the authors wrote in their upcoming article. "This is a smart way to fight transnational terrorism."
SOURCE UT Dallas
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