Conscription was an obvious topic for economists to study during the heyday of the Vietnam war but, as the US draft threat has receded, so has the literature. One area where conscription remains important however is in the developing world, in particular, Latin America. Here the military...

This paper aims at forecasting the burden on the Greek economy resulting from the arms race against Turkey and at concentrating on the leading determinants of this burden. The military debt and the defence share of GDP are employed alternatively in order to approximate the measurement of the...

In this paper, new data from the south west of England are used to illustrate that defence dependent firms are likely to purchase more inputs locally than less defence-dependent firms. The results confirm that the defence industry's supply chain has unusual characterises and that defence...

A benefit-cost framework and the associated evidence is used to evaluate UK arms exports. Two issues are examined in detail. First, trade externalities; and second, a case study of the problems and costs of maintaining the UK submarine industrial base without exports.

This article examines the relationship between defence expenditure and economic performance in South Africa, both prior to and after that country's first fully democratic election in 1994. Prior to 1994 defence expenditure decisions were largely dominated by non-economic factors; since then...

The 1977 UN arms embargo was one of the main factors which led South Africa to establish a largely self sufficient import-substituting arms industry capable of meeting the apartheid state's demand for sophisticated weaponry. While macroeconomic studies suggest that high military spending had a...

In this paper I develop indices and rankings of potential and actual arms production for about one hundred and fifty countries for data pertaining to the early to mid-1990s. The countries' ranked indices are then compared. I find evidence that countries that can produce arms (potential) do...

This paper reviews the basic economic concepts relevant to international public goods production and applies them to the case of security and peace in southern Africa. To this end, it extracts from the literature a set of fundamental features that help determine the likelihood of success of any...

Defense budgets in Japan have been complicated compromises from numerous inputs - including threat perceptions, domestic industrial/technological base development, support for the bilateral security treaty with the United States and internal bureaucratic politics - but with the fall of the...

The possibility of domestic production raises a difficulty for arms export control measures, since embargoes, by raising the effective price of imports, increase the incentive for domestic production. We address this issue by developing a partial equilibrium model of the international arms...