Determinants of military expenditure and the role of globalisation in a cross-country analysis

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence offers conflicting views on the impact of globalisation on military expenditure. We contribute to the existing literature by investigating the effect of globalisation on military expenditure in 82 countries for the period, 1989–2012. After introducing economic and strategic variables into the model, we utilise the dynamic panel generalised method of moments system to estimate the relationship in the variables. The empirical findings reveal that globalisation reduces both military burden and real military expenditure. The findings are consistent, irrespective of the globalisation indicator adopted. The policy implications of the results are explained.     

Country survey VII: Military spending in Greece

Greece is one of the poorest members of the European Union, yet its defence burden is the highest in Europe and NATO. At around 5.6% of GDP in 1994 it is twice the average NATO and European Union burden. In terms of the human and material resources devoted to defence yearly Greece is in comparative terms the most militarised country in Europe. The purpose of this paper is to examine military spending in Greece. It begins with a brief survey of the Greek economy and its development as it relates to defence. The determinants of Greek military spending are then modelled and analysed. The causes of military spending appear to be primarily regional rivalries and conflicts. In particular the ongoing dispute with Turkey is the main external security determinant of defence spending in Greece. The supply of defence inputs is then examined with reference to equipment procurement and indigenous arms production.     

Military Expenditure,Endogeneity and Economic Growth

Abstract

While not always a concern for the general economic growth literature, the debate over the effects of military spending on growth continues to develop, with no consensus, but a deepening understanding of the limitations of previous work. One important issue that has not been adequately dealt with is the endogeneity of military spending in the growth equation, mainly because of the difficulty of finding any variables that would make adequate instruments. This paper considers this issue, using an endogenous growth model estimated on a large sample of 109 non-high-income countries for the period 1998–2012. The empirical analysis is framed within an instrumental variable setting that exploits the increase in military spending that occurs when unrest in a country escalates to turmoil. The estimation results show that endogeneity arising from reverse causality is a crucial issue, with the instrumental variable estimates providing a larger significant negative effect of military spending on growth than OLS would. This result is found to be robust to different sources of heterogeneity and different time periods.     

军用仿生技术发展趋势

仿生技术是武器装备发展的核心技术,已成为新概念武器装备发展及性能提升的常用方法,具有极其广阔的应用前景。文章针对仿生技术的发展历程、技术现状及其在军事装备发展中所发挥的作用进行阐述,分析了决定军事仿生技术发展的生物结构表征技术、仿生设计技术、生物制造技术与军事应用具体特点,以及军事仿生技术发展趋势。     

C4ISR系统领域分析与需求复用方法研究

重用作为一种领域模型的构建方法,可以快速构成一个有效的需求模型。分析了C4ISR系统军事需求模型的领域性及其需求共性,进而对比研究了C4ISR系统军事建模过程中的重用方法,为C4ISR系统军事需求开发中解决共性需求问题提供思路。     

Visual-simulation region proposal and generative adversarial network based ground military target recognition

Ground military target recognition plays a crucial role in unmanned equipment and grasping the battlefield dynamics for military applications, but is disturbed by low-resolution and noisy-representation. In this paper, a recognition method, involving a novel visual attention mechanism-based Gabor region proposal sub-network (Gabor RPN) and improved refinement generative adversarial sub-network (GAN), is proposed. Novel central–peripheral rivalry 3D color Gabor filters are proposed to simulate retinal structures and taken as feature extraction convolutional kernels in low-level layer to improve the recognition accuracy and framework training efficiency in Gabor RPN. Improved refinement GAN is used to solve the problem of blurry target classification, involving a generator to directly generate large high-resolution images from small blurry ones and a discriminator to distinguish not only real images vs. fake images but also the class of targets. A special recognition dataset for ground military target, named Ground Military Target Dataset (GMTD), is constructed. Experiments performed on the GMTD dataset effectively demonstrate that our method can achieve better energy-saving and recognition results when low-resolution and noisy-representation targets are involved, thus ensuring this algorithm a good engineering application prospect.     

基于订阅分发机制的军事信息系统知识库协同框架探讨

针对分布在不同军工领域的小型知识库无法发挥跨领域知识按需共享的问题,提出了一种基于订阅/分发机制的分布式知识库协同框架,描述了知识库协同框架的系统结构以及主要的功能组成,通过知识库实例分析说明,阐明了协同框架进行数据交换共享的运行机制。     

Guns and butter? Military expenditure and health spending on the eve of the Arab Spring

We examine the validity of the guns-versus-butter hypothesis in the pre-Arab Spring era. Using panel data from 1995 to 2011 – the eve of the Arab uprisings – we find no evidence that increased security needs as measured by the number of domestic terrorist attacks are complemented by increased military spending or more importantly ‘crowd out’ government expenditure on key public goods such as health care. This suggests that both expenditure decisions were determined by other considerations at the government level.