The Security-Welfare Relationship: Longitudinal Evidence from Taiwan

We investigate the security-welfare relationship in the case of Taiwan. Specifically, we analyze any possible longitudinal relationship between the government's allocations of dollars and personnel to the military on the one hand, and social welfare as measured by the physical quality of life index on the other. Our results show that the defense burden, whether operationalized in terms of the relative size of the island's military budget or in terms of the relative size of its military establishment, has played neither a major positive nor negative role in determining the changes in its social welfare. We have been unable to find statistically significant evidence of the defense burden influencing social welfare either directly or indirectly (through its effects on the growth of GNP per capita and on the government's welfare and education spending). These results suggest that Taiwan deviates from general cross-national patterns, and indicate the need for further investigation into why it has been relatively successful in dampening the widely suspected trade-offs between defense burden on the one hand, and economic growth and social welfare on the other.