Military Spending and Income Inequality

John D. Abell
Additional contact information
John D. Abell: Department of Economics, Randolph-Macon Woman's College

Journal of Peace Research, 1994, vol. 31, issue 1, 35-43

Abstract: While volumes have been written on the individual topics of military economics and income distribution, only scant attention has been paid to the potential impact of military spending on the distribution of a nation's income. The traditional academic focus on the military has centered on issues such as spending impacts on employment, income and inflation, or on whether industrialized countries, in particular the United States, have become too dependent upon the military for their economic well being. Above and beyond these concerns, there is evidence that military spending is associated with increasing income inequality. Among other reasons this association exists because of pay differentials in civilian vs. military related work (including direct armed forces activities as well as military contract work), because of fewer opportunities for women and minorities among military contractors, which then exacerbates existing gender and race pay differentials, and, lastly, because of the profitability of military related contracts relative to commercial production. The relationship between military spending and the distribution of income is examined for the United States during the post-Vietnam War period using time-series data. Empirical estimates reveal that military spending is indeed associated with increasing income inequality, after controlling for macro-economic variables such as taxes, economic growth, interest rates, inflation and non-military spending. The results are generally robust to alternative definitions of both the military spending and income distribution measures.

Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/31/1/35.abstract (text/html)

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:sae:joupea:v:31:y:1994:i:1:p:35-43

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().