Military Expenditure And Economic Growth In The Middle East

This book investigates the role and the impacts of armies and military regimes in the Middle East. It argues that one of the main causes of the slow and stagnated economic development in the region is high military expenditure perpetuated by strong grips of armies on the politics of the region.

This book presents a detailed and rigorous quantitative economic assessment, analysis, and interpretation of the causes and consequences of regional defense expenditures in countries in the Middle East and South Asia. It examines the relationship between defense spending and budgetary allocations.

A study that contributes to the debate on whether defense spending encourages or hinders economic growth. It assesses the effect of politics on economic growth in developing societies, with a focus on the Middle East. It urges Third World leaders to improve levels of freedom, democracy, and openness of their political systems.

This paper analyzes trends in world military expenditure by examining the shares of different country groups and the ratio to GDP of individual nations. The coverage is military expenditures in 125 countries from 1972 to 1988. The study also compares military expenditures as a proportion of central government expenditures; analyzes the budgetary trade-off between military, social, and development expenditures; and discusses the impact of military expenditures on economic development.

Although conventional wisdom suggests that reducing military spending may improve a country’s economic growth performance, empirical studies have produced ambiguous results. This paper extends a standard growth model and estimates it using techniques that exploit both cross-section and time-series dimensions of available data to obtain consistent estimates of the growth-retarding effects of military spending via its adverse impact on capital formation and resource allocation. Model simulations suggest that a substantial long-run “Peace Dividend”--in the form of higher capacity output--may result from: (i) markedly lower military expenditure levels achieved in most regions during the late 1980s; and (ii) further military spending cuts that would be possible in the future if a global peace could be secured.