Until recently, a long-standing, impressively large, and growing literature on the effects of military expenditure on economic growth appeared to have failed to result in a scholarly consensus. But the availability of 20 more years of data since the thawing of the cold war has helped researchers...

While many articles have been written on the determinants of military expenditure in developing countries, few have attempted to use a qualitative approach to investigate the underlying motives for military expenditure. This article uses data drawn from interviews with key informants and...

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...

Defense literature is still in need of a theoretical framework in the neoclassical sense, in regard to empirical research on the relationship between defense spending and economic growth. In this respect, Dunne, Smith and Willenbockel (2005), although not without technical problems, represented...

We investigate how the influence of the military differs across authoritarian regimes and verify whether there are actually systematic differences in military expenditures amongst different forms of dictatorships. We argue that public choices in autocracies result from a struggle for power...

This paper examines the impact of military expenditure on economic growth on a large balanced panel, using an exogenous growth model and dynamic panel data methods for 106 countries over the period 1988-2010. A major focus of the paper is to consider the possibility group heterogeneity and...

This paper describes George Washington's administration response to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to quash a slave rebellion in Haiti (then Saint Domingue). Washington bypassed Congress and authorized assistance to the French planters, hoping that...

National defense is the textbook example of a public good. In order to understand how economists present public goods to undergraduates, we analyze 50 texts from across three widely taught undergraduate economics courses: principles of economics, intermediate microeconomics, and public finance....

State-provided defense is a form of non-comprehensive government planning subject to two inherent problems. The first is the “knowledge problem” of how to allocate scarce resources to their highest-valued uses. The second is the “power problem” due to the discretionary power granted to...

The number of Russian Armed Forces (RFAF) authorized strength at year-end 2017 increased 17,387 to 1,903,758 on the back of disbandment of the Federal Special Construction Agency (Spetsstroy); therefore, the RFAF's total authorized strength rose to 1,013,628 from 1 million. That was the first...