Wars can be immensely damaging to economies, and they can leave long-lasting scars on society. What are considered to be postwar or postviolence situations can see ongoing nonwar political, domestic, and criminal violence, with war economies not ending with the formal cessation of hostilities....

This chapter considers macroeconomic aspects of violence. It moves beyond the usual focus on war to argue the economic importance of all forms and aspects of armed and unarmed violence. Violence refers to acts of self-harm, interpersonal violence, and collective violence. Self-harm includes...

This paper reviews the origin and theoretical foundation of the concept Military-Industrial Complex and explains the key issues involved in the literature on the MIC in the Cold war context. It then considers the implications for the MIC of some main post-Cold War developments, with particular...

The debt crisis that struck South American countries in the 1980s led to severe recession, and chronic economic problems. This paper considers one potentially important contributor to the growth of external debt, namely military spending. It considers the experience of Argentina, Brazil and...

This paper considers the impact of military spending on debt in a panel of 11 small industrialising economies using panel data methods. It provides estimates for fixed effects and random effects models and then moves on to consider dynamic models. The dynamics are found to be important and the...

A large literature has used tests for Granger (1969) non-causality, GNC, to examine the interaction of military spending with the economy. Such tests answer a specific though quite limited question: can one reject the null hypothesis that one variable does not help predict another? If this null...

This paper considers the determinants of military spending, building on an emerging literature that estimates military expenditure demand functions in cross-section and panel data, incorporating ‘arms-race’ type effects. It updates Dunne and Perlo-Freeman (2003b) using the SIPRI military...

This paper considers the economic theories that are relevant for the study of peace war and international security . It presents different levels of generality, starting with the big questions of international security, which are usually the domain of international relations, before moving to...

This paper considers the link between arms spending and economic growth for developing countries, in particular whether high spending on arms is likely to have a negative effect on economic growth and what benefits that might be gained by reducing it. The literature is complex and difficult to...

This paper reviews some of the theoretical and econometric issues involved in estimating growth models that include military spending. While the mainstream growth literature has not found military expenditure to be a significant determinant of growth, much of the defence economics literature has...