Wars can be immensely damaging to economies, and they can leave long-lasting scars on society. What are considered to be postwar or postviolence situations can see ongoing nonwar political, domestic, and criminal violence, with war economies not ending with the formal cessation of hostilities....

This chapter considers macroeconomic aspects of violence. It moves beyond the usual focus on war to argue the economic importance of all forms and aspects of armed and unarmed violence. Violence refers to acts of self-harm, interpersonal violence, and collective violence. Self-harm includes...

This chapter is a review of our empirical knowledge regarding arms trade offsets. Extant evidence suggests that offset arrangements do not yield net benefits for a country’s economic development. As a general rule arms trade offset deals are more costly than off-the-shelf arms purchases,...

This second issue of The EPS Journal takes up the theme of economic aspects of peacemaking and peacekeeping. Economics Nobel-Laureate Lawrence R. Klein reviews the arguments for, and the likely cost of, a standing United Nations peacekeeping force. Lloyd J. Dumas argues that minimizing economic...

This piece introduces the new journal. This issue 'Conflict or Development?' has a regional focus on Africa. Joseph Stiglitz discusses the role of information in conflict and draws a fascinating analogy between civil strife and a labor strike. Paul Collier and Neil Cooper take different...

Over the last 30 years there has been an impressive amount of empirical work on the defence-growth nexus, using different methodologies, models and econometric techniques and focusing on individual case studies, cross-country studies or panel data studies. Despite the number and the variety of...

This paper considers the complementary effect of corruption and military spending on economic growth, analyzing both the direct impact of public spending and effect of allocating resources between categories of public spending within the framework of an endogenous growth model. The...

The first reference to a military industrial complex (MIC) was made by US President Eisenhower in 1961. He then referred to something historically specific: the build-up of a large permanent military establishment and a permanent arms industry, which raised his concerns for the unwarranted...

The recent recession has seen something of resurgence in the debate over military Keynesianism. Recent commentators who should no better have claimed that it would make sense to stimulate the US economy through increases in military spending, as though this has not been a commonly contested view...

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...