Military Spending, Growth, Development and Conflict

This paper makes a contribution to the debate on the economic effects of military spending using a large cross country panel data set for 1988-2006. As well as providing a relatively up to date analysis, sub groups are created that allow the analysis to focus on groups of countries at different income levels and Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), an area which has seen a large number of damaging conflicts. Estimating the empirical growth model suggested in Dunne et al (2005) gives results that show variation across the subgroups, with the general picture of significant negative short run effect and insignificant long run effect of military burden on per capita GDP growth, not consistent across the different income groups. In addition, breaking down the SSA group into those involved in conflict and those that are not, provides some further intriguing findings that suggest the value of further work on the impact of conflict on growth.