Optimal versus required defence expenditure: The case of the Greek-Turkish arms race

The aim of this paper is to indicate the extent to which the arms race against Turkey, in which Greece and Cyprus have been entangled, imposes a defence expenditure burden that is tough for the two allies to bear. To do so we have resorted to evaluating the optimal military expenditure for the two countries, allied in the context of the Integrated Defence Doctrine, which is compatible with the constraints imposed by the resources of their economies. All experiments and scenarios examined lead to the conclusion that the current defence burden of the two allies seems to be driving their economies beyond capacity limits. The fact remains, however, that under the circumstances, a one-sided disarmament policy like the one currently followed by Greece, is a risky choice given that the long-term armament programmes pursued by Turkey, whose role in this arms race has been proven as leading, leave very small room to the Greek and Cypriot sides to reduce their own defence expenditure.     

Budgetary trade-offs of security expenditures in Turkey

This paper investigates the budgetary trade-off structure of security (defence+internal security) expenditures in Turkey for the period 1983-1998. A modified version of Todaro's distributive share index of social welfare is used to quantify the impacts on the growth of primary budget expenditures of Security, Education, Health, General Administration, Infrastructure, and Social Services. We find that defence expenditures dominate overall security expenditures and are less affected in times of bottlenecks in the economy. A systematic pattern of negative budgetary trade-offs of security expenditures in terms of other components is not identified. We also analyse the expenditures of the Defence Industry Support Fund in an attempt to find the cost of the modernisation program to the economy.     

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF SECURITY POLICIES

This paper analyses public policy choices in the security economy from an economic perspective. It discusses the role of public goods for national and global security and identifies the importance of the first‐ and second‐order indirect effects of insecurity on economic activity, which include the behavioural responses of agents and the government to security measures, akin to such effects in insurance economics. Furthermore, key public policy trade‐offs are outlined, in particular between security and efficiency, globalisation, equity and freedom. The analysis identifies suitable policy options for raising security in the national and international contexts and in view of these trade‐offs. A balance between market and non‐market instruments in achieving security should be aimed for in order to minimise the adverse effects of aiming for higher security. In addition, the public good nature of security implies that international coordination of security policies is important, despite this process being fraught with enforcement problems.     

SYMBIOTIC SPIES

Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb, by Michael S. Goodman. Stanford University Press, 2007. 295 pages, $50.     

Screening multi-dimensional heterogeneous populations for infectious diseases under scarce testing resources,with application to COVID-19

Testing provides essential information for managing infectious disease outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. When testing resources are scarce, an important managerial decision is who to test. This decision is compounded by the fact that potential testing subjects are heterogeneous in multiple dimensions that are important to consider, including their likelihood of being disease-positive, and how much potential harm would be averted through testing and the subsequent interventions. To increase testing coverage, pooled testing can be utilized, but this comes at a cost of increased false-negatives when the test is imperfect. Then, the decision problem is to partition the heterogeneous testing population into three mutually exclusive sets: those to be individually tested, those to be pool tested, and those not to be tested. Additionally, the subjects to be pool tested must be further partitioned into testing pools, potentially containing different numbers of subjects. The objectives include the minimization of harm (through detection and mitigation) or maximization of testing coverage. We develop data-driven optimization models and algorithms to design pooled testing strategies, and show, via a COVID-19 contact tracing case study, that the proposed testing strategies can substantially outperform the current practice used for COVID-19 contact tracing (individually testing those contacts with symptoms). Our results demonstrate the substantial benefits of optimizing the testing design, while considering the multiple dimensions of population heterogeneity and the limited testing capacity.     

A mathematical formulation and efficient heuristics for the dynamic container relocation problem

The container relocation problem (CRP) is concerned with emptying a single yard‐bay which contains J containers each following a given pickup order so as to minimize the total number of relocations made during their retrieval process. The CRP can be modeled as a binary integer programming (IP) problem and is known to be NP‐hard. In this work, we focus on an extension of the CRP to the case where containers are both received and retrieved from a single yard‐bay, and call it the dynamic container relocation problem. The arrival (departure) sequences of containers to (from) the yard‐bay is assumed to be known a priori. A binary IP formulation is presented for the problem. Then, we propose three types of heuristic methods: index based heuristics, heuristics using the binary IP formulation, and a beam search heuristic. Computational experiments are performed on an extensive set of randomly generated test instances. Our results show that beam search heuristic is very efficient and performs better than the other heuristic methods.Copyright © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 61: 101–118, 2014     

Military Expenditures,Income Inequality,Welfare and Political Regimes: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between type of welfare regimes and military expenditures. There is a sizeable empirical literature on the development of the welfare state and on the typology of the welfare regimes. There appear to be, however, no empirical studies that examine welfare regimes with special attention to military spending. This study aims at providing a comprehensive analysis on the topic by considering several different welfare regime typologies. To do so, we use dynamic panel data analysis for 37 countries for the period of 1988–2003 by considering a wide range of control variables such as inequality measures, number of terrorist events, and size of the armed forces. We also replicate the same analyses for the political regimes. Our findings, in line with the literature, show that there is a positive relationship between income inequality and share of military expenditures in the central government budget, and that the number of terrorist events is a significant factor that affects both the level of military expenditure and inequality. Also, the paper reveals a significant negative relationship between social democratic welfare regimes and military expenditures.