Military Spending in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some Evidence for 1967-85

Abstract

This article is a contribution to the debate on the determinants and economic effects of military expenditure in less-developed economies. Recent empirical work has suggested that there is much to be gained from analysing groups of relatively homogeneous countries, and to this end it focuses on a sample of thirteen Sub-Saharan African countries over the period from 1967 to 1985. The econometric analysis uses data for the group of countries as a whole, a cross-sectional analysis of the country averages, and an analysis of the pooled country data. As regards the determinants of military spending, the results suggest that economic factors play an important role in determining the level of military burden across countries and over time for the sample as a whole. When the data are pooled, strategic factors such as wars, the size of the army and inertia become important. In a time-series analysis, military expenditure is also found to have a negative effect on economic development for the countries as a whole, through its negative indirect effects on human resource accumulation, investment allocations and the balance of payments. While this result is not found across countries, or when the data are pooled, the results still imply that there is no significant positive effect of military burden on economic growth. Together, these results show the value of attempting to capture both time-series and cross-sectional effects when analysing the determinants and economic effects of military spending and the value of dealing with relatively homogeneous groups of countries.

Military expenditure and economic growth: A meta-analysis

“…These are studies by Cappelen et al (1984) and Landau (1996), in which both use a sample of OECD countries and Kollias et al (2007) concentrates on EU countries. Gyimah-Brempong (1989) and Dunne and Mohammed (1995) particularly look at a sample of African countries rather than a general of sample LDCs. Gyimah-Brempong ( Although Stroup and Heckelman (2001) advocate the non-linear relationship between growth 8 The positive effect of milexp may be arising from providing security would not be sufficient to respond the opportunities foregone.…”

Military expenditure and economic growth: A demand and supply model for Greece, 1960–96*

“…Kapopoulos and Lazaretou (1993), Kollias (1994Kollias ( , 1996, Avramides (1997), Antonakis and Karavidas (1990) and Antonakis (1995Antonakis ( ,1997 all analyse the demand for Greek military spending. In this paper we use a simple demand model developed to reflect the features of the Greek economy (see Smith, 1980;Dunne and Mohammed, 1995). This leads us to the following specification: Defence is considered a public good and conventional public finance theory suggests that the levels of military spending should be positively related to income.…”

“…POL to capture the effect of the military government that was in power for seven years and CYP, an impulse dummy for the year 1974 to capture the effect of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Although military governments tend to spend more on defence this is not a general fact and, as Dunne and Mohammed (1995) claimed, "there is unlikely to be a simple dichotomy between military and non-military governments". As such, we cannot predetermine the sign of POL.…”

“…Turkey's military burden (TM) is introduced to see whether Greece's military burden depends on the "enemy's" military burden. Finally, the lagged value of the dependent (M) is introduced to account for inertia, such as hang-over from previous expenditures or commitments to programmes (Dunne and Mohammed, 1995).…”

Military spending and the black market premium in developing countries

“…The third set of studies found some mixed and or insignificant results (Smith and Smith 1980;Frederiksen and Looney 1982;Deger and Smith 1983;Biswas and Ram 1986;Deger 1986;Looney and Frederiksen 1986;Joerding 1986;Hess 1989;Alexander 1990;Adams et al 1991;Chowdhury 1991;Mintz and Huang 1991;Adams et al 1992;Chan 1992;Chen 1993;Looney and Frederiksen 1993;Park 1993;Kusi 1994;Dunne and Mohammed 1995;Mintz and Stevenson 1995;Kollias and Stelios 2000). 2 Another set of studies provides some possible link between military spending and other macro variables.…”