Turkey has been undergoing a severe economic crisis recently. Despite its low standing in terms of basic economic and welfare indicators, Turkey has been leading in arms imports. The pressing issues of macroeconomic imbalances are budget deficits, current account deficits and external debt...

National Defense is a public good that requires resources for its production and its availability affects the economic behavior of private agents. A major policy problem of the government is to find an optimal allocation of resources between private use and national defense. It is shown that, in...

This article delineates the history of how disarmament became a concept in economic thought and reviews the relevant writings of economists such as Veblen, Wicksell, Pareto, Schumpeter, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, Bukharin, Sombart, Keynes, Pigou, and Robbins, and of selected classical...

Estimating demand functions for developing countries before and after the end of the Cold War, Dunne and Perlo-Freeman (2003) found little evidence of any change in the underlying relationship. One concern with their analysis was that the use of cross-section averages might have obscured...

The aim of this paper is to provide insights on war spending using simple tools of financial calculus rather than developing a general theory. Combining Grossman and Han's theory of war finance with the empirical literature that displays a straightforward relationship between the real value of...

We briefly illustrate the application of fundamental principles of economics to three episodes of military history for the second millennium AD. The periods, principles, and cases examined are, first, the European Middle Ages (1000-1300; opportunity cost; siege warfare); second, the Enlightenment...

This paper explores relationships between the arms trade and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa from 1967 to 1997. We present a bivariate logistic regression model to explain the variance in domestic and international conflict incidence in the region. Our models indicate that the relationship...

Compliance to non-violent norms of collective behaviour may be contingent on the internal political stability of a state. If external developments give rise to economic incentives for agents to change their allegiance, increasing international tension may be a strategy employed in order to...

This paper examines the effect of military expenditure on the profitability of the Greek economy for the 1962-1994 period. In the theoretical debate on the role of military expenditures they have alternatively been viewed either as a "burden on growth" (i.e. an unproductive drain of resources)...

A statistically based enquiry into recruitment into the British Army over the period 1987-2000 shows that two factors tend to induce young men to enlist: high levels of unemployment in the civilian sector and positive signals from the authorities that the Army is in a recruiting phase. The same...