TERRORIST THREATS AND TRANSITIONAL DYNAMICS IN AN OVERLAPPING GENERATIONS MODEL

Previous research has shown that the duration of a civil war is in part a function of how it ends: in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement. We present a model of how protagonists in a civil war choose to stop fighting. Hypotheses derived from this theory relate the duration of a civil war to its outcome as well as characteristics of the civil war and the civil war nation. Findings from a competing risk model reveal that the effects of predictors on duration vary according to whether the conflict ended in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement.     

面向任务的随舰备件配置方法

研究了多阶段任务成功概率的计算方法,根据舰船多阶段任务的特点,建立了随舰备件配置模型.提出了系统修整过程中确定备件配置方案的分析方法与系统执行任务过程中基于粒子群算法的备件配置模型.经实例分析表明:该模型既满足了任务成功概率的要求,又充分利用了舰船排水量和宝贵的备件存储空间,对于随舰备件的配置具有普遍的适用性.     

Country survey IX: Spain

From the early 1980s Spain embarked on a wide‐ranging process of military reform, from organisational changes to defence industrial policies. Investment in military equipment was set to grow, policies were drawn up to foster the domestic defence industrial base, defence R&D rocketed, and Spain joined a myriad of international arms development programmes. Yet, by 1991 the process of reform had run out of steam. Expenditure planning proved unreliable, and firms suffered from sharp cutbacks in procurement expenditure. The model of defence industrial growth sketched in the mid‐1980s had floundered. The Spanish case provides an example of how the quest to maximise defence procurement from domestic sources can fall victim to industrial and budgetary constraints. Spanish defence producers are now becoming increasingly intertwined with foreign defence companies.     

THE DEFENCE SPENDING–EXTERNAL DEBT NEXUS IN ETHIOPIA

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of defence spending and income on the evolution of Ethiopia’s external debt over the period 1970–2005. Using the bounds test approach to cointegration and Granger causality tests, we find a long run and a causal relationship between external debt, defence spending and income. Defence spending had a positive and a significant impact on the stock of external debt while income had a negative and a statistically significant impact on external debt. Our findings suggest that an increase in defence spending contributes to the accumulation of Ethiopia’s external debt, while an increase in economic growth helps Ethiopia to reduce its external debt.     

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.     

DOES MILITARY EXPENDITURE MATTER FOR INFLATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH?

This paper sets up a monetary endogenous growth model, and uses it to explain the ambiguous linkage between the military burden and the inflation rate observed in existing empirical studies. It is found that an expansion in the military burden has an ambiguous effect on the inflation rate depending upon the relative extent of two conflicting forces. More specifically, if the increase in the marginal benefit from holding money exceeds (falls short of) the increase in the marginal product of private capital, the inflation rate will rise (fall) in response. Moreover, it is found that an increase in the military burden will stimulate the balanced growth rate, confirming Benoit’s famous empirical findings.     

Demand forecasting by temporal aggregation

Demand forecasting performance is subject to the uncertainty underlying the time series an organization is dealing with. There are many approaches that may be used to reduce uncertainty and thus to improve forecasting performance. One intuitively appealing such approach is to aggregate demand in lower‐frequency “time buckets.” The approach under concern is termed to as temporal aggregation, and in this article, we investigate its impact on forecasting performance. We assume that the nonaggregated demand follows either a moving average process of order one or a first‐order autoregressive process and a single exponential smoothing (SES) procedure is used to forecast demand. These demand processes are often encountered in practice and SES is one of the standard estimators used in industry. Theoretical mean‐squared error expressions are derived for the aggregated and nonaggregated demand to contrast the relevant forecasting performances. The theoretical analysis is supported by an extensive numerical investigation and experimentation with an empirical dataset. The results indicate that performance improvements achieved through the aggregation approach are a function of the aggregation level, the smoothing constant, and the process parameters. Valuable insights are offered to practitioners and the article closes with an agenda for further research in this area. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 60: 479–498, 2013