EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The economic costs and benefits of the European Future Combat Air System

Tobias Mueller

Defence and Peace Economics, 2025, vol. 36, issue 6, 875-904

Abstract: The Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a sixth-generation advanced combat aircraft, is assumed to be the largest European defence development and production programme of the 21st century and a core pillar of European cooperation in the defence sector. The 2017-initiated collaboration programme is led by Germany and France, with Spain and Belgium joining as partners, and is a who-is-who of the largest European defence companies, including Airbus Defence and Space, Thales, Safran, MBDA, and MTU. While such defence programmes have significant military, political, industrial, and economic impacts, the economic dimension in terms of economic costs and benefits is often under-represented in academic discussions. As the FCAS is still a nascent programme, only rough estimates of the total programme cost are available, and assumptions range from €100 bn to more than a trillion. With our research, we aim to contribute to the academic discussion by estimating the true economic costs and benefits of the FCAS. We use a mixed approach of data triangulation by cross-checking open source intelligence (OSINT) with expert interviews to estimate the full programme life-cycle costs. Furthermore, we estimate its economic impact on the European gross value added, employment, and tax by utilising an input – output (IO) model.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10242694.2025.2452867 (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:36:y:2025:i:6:p:875-904

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

DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2025.2452867

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-10-07
Handle: RePEc:taf:defpea:v:36:y:2025:i:6:p:875-904