Do Economic Determinants Affect the Size of Military Spending?

Institutional determinants of military spending

Drawing on a database for 1988-2006 containing information on 157 countries, we investigate the effects on military spending of government form, electoral rules, concentration of parliamentary parties, and ideology. From an OLS regression on pooled data, our results show that presidential democracies spend more than parliamentary systems on defense, whereas the presence of a plurality voting sy...

Military Spending and Economic Growth in Sub Saharan Africa

The economic effects of military spending is an important issue for developing countries, particularly for regions such as Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), has been through considerable turmoil, with high levels of conflict in the region and generally poor economic performance. There has, however, been a limited amount of empirical work on the area, particularly work that takes into account the years ...

Optimal military spending, trade and stochastic economic growth

In this paper, based on dynamic programming we investigate the military spending, trade and wealth accumulation in a stochastic endogenous growth model. For the CobbDauglas utility function, explicit solutions of the optimal problem in the home country are obtained, and the optimal consumptions of domestic goods and foreign goods, the share of domestic capital stock and foreign bond holdings ar...

Military Spending, Investment and Economic Growth in Small Industrialising Economies

An enduring and important debate in economics concerns the effects of military spending on economic growth. It has generated a huge literature, with a variety of results and no clear consensus. The end of the Cold War led to marked reductions in military burdens and to renewed concerns on whether this was likely to lead to a ‘peace dividend’ or a ‘peace penalty’. This paper revisits the debate ...

The Politics of Military Spending