The Costs of U.S. Hegemony: Military Power, Military Spending, and U.S. Trade Performance

Michael Oden
Additional contact information
Michael Oden: Department of Community and Regional Planning, Goldsmith Hall-Room 2.308, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1160, oden@mail.utexas.edu

Review of Radical Political Economics, 1999, vol. 31, issue 4, 32-60

Abstract: For David Gordon and his collaborators in the social structures of accumulation (SSA) tradition, the willingness to threaten potential adversaries with military forces capable of acting on a global scale was seen to positively affect the U.S. terms of trade. U.S. hegemony yielded specific supply side benefits as favorable terms of trade reduced relative input prices and boosted profitability. Although Gordon and his co-authors recognize the potential costs of sustaining a large, globally active military apparatus, these costs are not incorporated in the econometric models supporting the SSA theory. This paper attempts to extend the SSA analysis by empirically measuring the effects of both military spending and military power on U.S. trade performance over the 1951-1987 period. It is shown that while military power and spending commitments may have positive effects on the terms of trade, these military variables had direct and indirect negative impacts on the U.S. net export balance and therefore domestic aggregate demand. In the context of a model of U.S. growth performance open to international transactions, the overall effect of the postwar military system on U.S. economic growth was likely negative in the cold-war era.

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/31/4/32.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:reorpe:v:31:y:1999:i:4:p:32-60

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().