Alternative Approaches to the Arms Industry: Some Suggestions for a Research Programme

Christian Schmidt
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Christian Schmidt: University of Paris IX

Chapter 17 in Structural Change, Economic Interdependence and World Development, 1987, pp 255-263 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The arms industry has already been the subject of a great many studies by specialists in a variety of disciplines. Essentially, though, it has been researched by political scientists and economists from rather different standpoints. The most interesting contributions from the political scientists have been as part of the recent developments of general models intended to represent the dynamics of armaments. The arms industry appears in models of the ‘Arms Building’ category,1 emphasising the bureaucratic and political variables in the growth and trend of military spending (Rattinger, 1975; Orstrom, 1977, 1978; Nimcic and Cusack, 1979; Cusack and Don Ward, 1981). All these models, designed by political scientists, generally consider the military sector as a homogenous set and treat their demand as an independent variable. In response to that demand, they study the trend for public funds allocated to the arms sector as the outcome of more or less complex trade-offs between the executive, translated by the budget introduced by the president and defence minister, and the legislature, corresponding to amendments by parliament. This essentially national, bureaucratic approach to some extent constitutes an alternative to the very numerous international models designed on an interaction basis along the lines explored by Richardson.2

Keywords: Political Scientist; American Political Science Review; Military Expenditure; Military Spending; Defence Budget (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1987
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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-09117-1_17

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