In recent years, there has been a growing number of studies that investigate the economic effects of military spending using a variety of estimation methods and focusing either on individual countries or on groups of relatively homogeneous countries. The situation is not the same as far as the demand for military expenditure is concerned, where less attention has been given and the majority of empirical studies have focused on individual countries, with only a few focusing on groups of countries and employing cross-sectional or panel data approaches. A region that has not attracted any research interest regarding the determinants of military expenditure is the European Union (EU) with the exception of individual country studies (mainly for the UK, Greece, France, Spain, Portugal). This paper argues that understanding the determinants of military spending in these countries is very important, especially given the discussions in recent years towards the development of a Common European Security and Defence Policy (CESDP). It then follows Dunne et al. (2003) and employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration to estimate a general model of aggregate defence spending for each of the 15 core EU countries over the period 1961-2005. The findings indicate that there is very little uniformity in the factors that determine each country's demand for military expenditure, something that needs to be borne in mind by policy makers when burden-sharing issues are considered in the development of the CESDP.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 210000 papers.