Is Military Spending Converging Across Countries? An Examination of Trends and Key Determinants

Benedict Clements, Sanjeev Gupta and Saida Khamidova

No 2019/196, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: This paper studies the evolution of worldwide military spending during 1970-2018. It finds that military spending in relation to GDP is converging, but into three separate groups of countries. In the largest group, responsible for 90 percent of worldwide spending, outlays have remained stubbornly high. Military spending in developing economies reacts to improvements in security conditions and military spending in neighboring countries, suggesting that further increases in the peace dividend are possible. In developing economies, rising social spending tends to crowd out military outlays, but this is not the case in advanced economies. With social outlays projected to rise as developing countries look to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), military spending could come under pressure to fall further.

Keywords: WP; spending doe; high-spending country; Military spending; social spending; convergence; education expenditure data; military expenditure; expenditure side; data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; country's outlay; expenditure conditionality; country sample; Defense spending; Health care spending; Total expenditures; Education spending; Global; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2019-09-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=48556 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2019/196

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().