Offsets, arrangements that obligate the arms seller to reinvest (“offset”) arms sales proceeds in the purchasing country, are an increasingly important facet of the international trade in arms. They are used to justify spending on imports by promises that there will be significant benefits...

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...

Egypt plays a pivotal role in the security of the Middle East as the doorway to Europe and its military expenditure reflects its involvement in the machinations of such an unstable region, showing considerable variation over the last forty years. These characteristics make it a particularly...

A large literature has used tests for Granger (1969) non-causality, GNC, to examine the interaction of military spending with the economy. Such tests answer a specific though quite limited question: can one reject the null hypothesis that one variable does not help predict another? If this null...

This paper reviews the origin and theoretical foundation of the concept Military-Industrial Complex and explains the key issues involved in the literature on the MIC in the Cold war context. It then considers the implications for the MIC of some main post-Cold War developments, with particular...

The debt crisis that struck South American countries in the 1980s led to severe recession, and chronic economic problems. This paper considers one potentially important contributor to the growth of external debt, namely military spending. It considers the experience of Argentina, Brazil and...

This paper considers the impact of military spending on debt in a panel of 11 small industrialising economies using panel data methods. It provides estimates for fixed effects and random effects models and then moves on to consider dynamic models. The dynamics are found to be important and the...