Soviet Military and Civilian Resource Allocation 1951-1980

The “guns versus butter†literature focuses mainly on the industrialized capitalist democracies and has reported little success in empirically substantiating the existence of durable trade-off relationships between military spending and particular civilian programs during peacetime. This article identifies structural features of Soviet-type politicoeconomic systems that make them more likely to display such durable trade-offs and then demonstrates the point by multiple regression time-series estimation of the effects of changing rates of growth in Soviet military spending on 13 major civilian programs during the period 1951-1980, controlling for demographic, economic growth, and leadership succession effects. Despite considerable noise in the Soviet military spending data, substantial and robust trade-off phenomena are demonstrated only for housing construction and the production of durable consumer goods, whereas ideologically favored programs for productive investment and social spending (except perhaps old-age pensions) appear to have been much less affected by marginal changes in military spending.