Endogenous Growth and Defense Expenditures: A New Explanation of the Benoit Hypothesis

This paper develops an endogenous growth model to examine the linkage between military expenditures and economic growth. We adopt the modeling strategy where both the supply side and the demand side effects of national defense are taken into considerations. Our result finds that a rise in military spending tends to stimulate the sustained growth rate, confirming Benoit's famous empirical findings.     

The structure of the defense industry and the security needs of the country: a differentiated products model

This paper models the interactions between the defense needs of the USA and Western Europe, which produce several heterogeneous defense goods, and the defense industry market structure. The results show that net defense costs of the USA and Europe are lower when the number of defense firms in each arms‐producing country is small and when the world prices of the defense goods are high. The model predicts that the increase in world prices will crowd‐out countries in the developing world from the market for modern weapon systems and may force them to develop and use ‘cheap and dirty’ weapon systems.     

Book reviews

Jurgen Brauer's comment presents what he calls a replication of an earlier study by Higgs and Kilduff (1993) and uses it to criticize the adequacy of the Higgs‐Kilduff model. In several respects, however, Brauer has not actually performed a replication: he uses different data, a different sample period, and arrives at different results. His criticisms rest on his own setup, not that of Higgs and Kilduff. Therefore they have no strict applicability to the latter. Moreover, Brauer's stepwise model has no bearing on the Higgs‐Kilduff model, as it violates that model's specification requirements.     

Externality of Defense Expenditure in the United States: A New Analytical Technique to Overcome Multicollinearity

Abstract

This study estimates a three-sector Feder–Ram model using US annual data for 1965–2014 to confirm the externality of defense expenditure in the United States. Although the model is often used in the literature to scrutinize whether this effect exists, a flaw intrinsic to this model is the appearance of multicollinearity. In this study, I introduced novel techniques, namely: the standardization and estimation of a simple slope, to estimate the model. The results are as follows. First, I prove that the multicollinearity problem can be resolved by standardization. Second, externality, which is judged to conventionally exist, is not found. Third, increases in defense expenditure bring about positive but limited economic growth when the ratio of private to defense expenditure in the previous year ranges from 5.09 to 6.82%. By re-estimating the model, this study contributes to developing the Feder–Ram model within the related literature.     

TIME-VARYING CHARACTERISTICS OF SOUTH KOREA-UNITED STATES AND JAPAN-UNITED STATES MILITARY ALLIANCES UNDER CHINESE THREAT: A PUBLIC GOOD APPROACH

This paper investigates the nature of two military alliances under Chinese threat. The findings are as follows: First, South Korea does not consider China a significant threat while Japan and the United States have recognized China as a serious threat since the 1990s and the 2000s, respectively. Second, the relationship between South Korea and the United States is a true military alliance for all time periods, but the nature of the alliance has changed since the 1970s. Third, although Japan began to form an alliance relationship with the United States in the 1990s, Japan is considered a more significant ally by the United States. This paper implies that, should China provoke a military confrontation, it might be difficult to deduce a common solution among the three countries because of the different response to military threats from China.     

DEFENSE SPENDING AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN TURKEY: A LINEAR AND NON‐LINEAR GRANGER CAUSALITY APPROACH

This paper uses linear and non‐linear Granger causality methods to determine the causal relationship between defense spending and economic growth in Turkey for the period 1949–2004. The innovative feature of this paper is that it provides evidence regarding the nonlinear causal dependence between military spending and economic growth in Turkey. The empirical results contribute to the empirical literature by indicating support for both linear and non‐linear causality between military expenditures and economic development and they may prove useful in theoretical and empirical research by regulators and policy makers.     

ESCAPE FROM NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

Since the post-World War II genesis of nuclear deterrence, two presidential initiatives have been presented to deliver humanity from the threat of its failure. The first was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a constellation of space- and ground-based systems that President Ronald Reagan envisioned would render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” The second is President Barack Obama's roadmap to “a world without nuclear weapons,” commonly referred to as “Global Zero.” While these proposals appear to have little in common, deeper investigation reveals a number of provocative similarities in motivation and presentation. Moreover, both generated fierce debate, often with ideological overtones, about their strategic desirability and technical feasibility. We use these parallels, as well as prominent dissimilarities, to draw lessons from the SDI experience that can be applied to the debate over Global Zero.     

基于排队论的地面防空系统服务概率研究

排队理论计算地面防空系统的服务(可射击)概率时,因计算模型的制约,可能使计算结果大于实际结果,影响防空兵指挥员指挥决策的准确性。对此,根据地面防空系统的主要特征,分析了引起计算误差的因素和误差的可能取值范围,克服了排队论模型的局限性,为计算结果的修正提供了依据。     

Hard Balancing in the Age of American Unipolarity: The Russian Response to US Ballistic Missile Defense during the Bush Administration (2001–2008)

One of the central debates in contemporary international relations scholarship concerns the issue of whether balancing has occurred in response to US-based unipolarity, and if it has, how this should be characterised. Existing research has seen analysts argue that major power responses to unipolarity can be placed in one of either three categories: an absence of balancing, soft balancing, and hard balancing. This article contributes to the scholarly literature by providing a case study of hard internal Russian balancing against the US’s development and deployment of Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems during the Bush Administration (2001–08). Russian hard balancing against the US has involved: (1) fielding new strategic nuclear and conventional weapons equipped with BMD countermeasures, and, relatedly, (2) making changes in military doctrine. As a result, security dilemma dynamics are increasingly in evidence in US relations with Russia.     

Defense Spending and Unemployment in France

France has received little attention in the literature of defense economics, despite some outstanding features of the country’s situation. This study attempts to partially fill this gap with new empirical evidence which evaluates the influence of military expenditure on the unemployment rate between 1975 and 2008. Our estimation is based on the ARDL approach to cointegration. The results reveal that both defense and non-defense spending exert a negative influence on unemployment but that defense spending has a higher negative impact.