This paper presents a theoretical model and empirical evidence from 22 OECD countries to highlight how governments may use the tradeoff between social and military expenditure to advance their electoral and partisan objectives. Three basic results emerge. First, governments tend to bias outlays...

This article begins by emphasizing that the number and intensity of armed conflict has fallen substantially but that military expenditure levels in sub-Saharan Africa have nonetheless increased, largely as a result of South African expenditure. The article attempts to answer two questions....

With world military expenditure rising rapidly since 2000, one of the possible drivers that has drawn less attention has been the role of natural resource revenues, especially oil. Countries as diverse as Angola, Azerbaijan, Chad, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and Timor-Leste have seen huge rises...

The success of many developing countries, following an outward-orientated development strategy, became increasingly visible during the early 1980s. This stood in sharp contrast to the relatively unsuccessful inward-orientated, import substitution strategy followed by some other countries. East...

We examine whether government ideology was correlated with the growth in military expenditure in Germany over the period 1951-2011. By using various measures of government ideology, the results do not show any effect. The exception is an ideology measure based on the Comparative Manifesto...

This paper clarifies one of the puzzling results of the economic growth literature: the impact of military expenditure is frequently found to be non-significant or negative, yet most countries spend a large fraction of their GDP on defense and the military. We start by empirical evaluation of...

This paper clarifies one of the puzzling results of the economic growth literature: the impact of military expenditure is frequently found to be non-significant or negative, yet most countries spend a large fraction of their GDP on defense and the military. We start by empirical evaluation of...