The Soviet Union was able to develop a large military-industrial complex and become the world’s second superpower despite the small size of its malfunctioning planned economy because defence was given high priority status and special planning, rationing and administrative mechanism were...

Cash shortages caused by the credit crunch will force the UK's next government to choose between replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system and meeting flagship social policy goals. Replacing Trident will be a high risk project because a long lead-in time means that changing circumstances may...

This paper examines empirically whether democracies allocate fewer resources to the military than dictatorships do. It employs a panel of up to 112 countries over the period 1960-2000 to estimate a standard demand for military spending model. While papers on the determinants of military spending...

Defence expenditures have both costs and benefits to the economy. The costs of defence expenditures are mainly emphasized as opportunity costs. On the other hand, defence spending may have growth-promoting potential benefits: a rise in defence spending may result in a higher aggregate demand,...

For Smith, “defence” is presented as one of the three big areas requiring the “expenses of the sovereign or Commonwealth”, and therefore justifying state intervention in the economy, beside “justice” and “public works and public institutions”. Against the mercantilist thought,...

The possibility of domestic production raises a difficulty for arms export control measures, since embargoes, by raising the effective price of imports, increase the incentive for domestic production. We address this issue by developing a partial equilibrium model of the international arms...