US Military Spending: A Perspective on the Restructuring Dynamics of the Defense Sector

Eleonora Gentilucci

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2019, vol. 51, issue 4, 606-628

Abstract: The political economy of defense spending is enormously important given its magnitude and its global implication. Since the late 1990s, world and US military spending has being rising. This trend appears to be in sharp contrast to the long-term forecast about the so-called “peace dividend†formulated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In order to explain this trend of military expenditures in the United States, the restructuring of the defense sector (in terms of concentration and financialization), the shift from a focus on “defense†to “security,†and the role and influence of “vested interests†in this process leading to the creation of the military-security system, are taken into consideration. The relation between social spending and military expenditures is also discussed. JEL Classification: H56, H5, B5, F52, L16

Keywords: military expenditures; military-industrial system; military security system; political economy of defense spending; restructuration of the US defense sector (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0486613419844641 (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:51:y:2019:i:4:p:606-628

DOI: 10.1177/0486613419844641

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 ().