Does a Change of Government Influence Compliance with International Agreements? Empirical Evidence for the NATO Two Percent Target

Johannes Blum and Niklas Potrafke

Defence and Peace Economics, 2020, vol. 31, issue 7, 743-761

Abstract: We examine whether changes of government influence compliance with international agreements. We investigate compliance with the NATO two percent target to which all NATO countries committed themselves during the NATO summit in Wales in 2014. The dataset includes the military expenditure by NATO countries over the period 2010–2018. The results suggest that countries that do not (yet) comply with the two percent target have smaller growth rates in military expenditure relative to GDP when they experienced a large change of government, e.g. a change from a rightwing to a leftwing government, than countries that did not experience such a large change of government since the NATO summit in 2014. Countries that experienced a large change of government are, thus, less likely to comply with the two percent target. Future research should examine the credibility problem of national governments in other international agreements too.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10242694.2019.1575141 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Does a Change of Government Influence Compliance with International Agreements? Empirical Evidence for the NATO Two Percent Target (2020)
Journal Article: Does a Change of Government Influence Compliance with International Agreements? Empirical Evidence for the NATO Two Percent Target (2019)
Working Paper: Does A Change of Government Influence Compliance with International Agreements? Empirical Evidence for the NATO Two Percent Target (2019)
Working Paper: Does a Change of Government Influence Compliance with International Agreements? Empirical Evidence for the NATO Two Percent Target (2019)
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:31:y:2020:i:7:p:743-761

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

DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2019.1575141

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 ().