Military Spending and Democracy

Jennifer Brauner ()

No 1402, Birkbeck Working Papers in Economics and Finance from Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics

Abstract: This paper examines empirically whether democracies allocate fewer resources to the military than dictatorships do. It employs a panel of up to 112 countries over the period 1960-2000 to estimate a standard demand for military spending model. While papers on the determinants of military spending generally include democracy as a control variable, with a few exceptions, it is not the focus of their enquiry. This paper addresses resulting problems in the existing literature concerning data quality and the appropriate measurement of key variables, as well as the question of causality between military spending and democracy. It finds that democracies spend less on the military as a percentage of GDP than autocracies do and that causality runs from regime type to military spending.

Keywords: Military expenditure; regime type; political economy; defence economics; democracy. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hpe and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15281 First version, 2014 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Military spending and democracy (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bbk:bbkefp:1402

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