Does military spending promote social welfare? A comparative analysis of the BRICS and G7 countries

Ying Zhang, Xiaoxing Liu, Jiaxin Xu and Rui Wang

Defence and Peace Economics, 2017, vol. 28, issue 6, 686-702

Abstract: Whether military spending is capable of promoting social welfare is currently a controversial issue. The aim of this paper is to investigate how military spending affects the input and output of social welfare (i.e. social welfare expenditures and social welfare index). A panel cointegration analysis and an impulse response function are conducted with multi-country panel data, over two time periods, 1998–2011 and 1993–2007. In addition, to extend a comparative analysis over different economies, BRICS (i.e. Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and G7 (i.e. the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Canada) countries are selected as representatives of emerging economies and developed countries, respectively. The empirical results show that military spending enhances social welfare expenditures in developed countries, while the effect is ambiguous in emerging economies. Also, military spending is capable of promoting the social welfare index based on the FMOLS estimation. The comparative analyses indicate that unlike in the G7, the effect of the growth of military spending on the growth of social welfare expenditures is negative and shorter in the BRICS.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10242694.2016.1144899 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:defpea:v:28:y:2017:i:6:p:686-702

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GDPE20

DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2016.1144899

Access Statistics for this article

Defence and Peace Economics is currently edited by Professor Keith Hartley

More articles in Defence and Peace Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().