defense economics

defense economics
Field of national economic management concerned with peacetime and wartime military expenditures.

It arose in response to the greater scale and sophistication of warfare in the 20th century. Most nations seek to avoid the vast financial and human costs of war
which include the lost earnings of those killed or injured, lifetime medical care needed for those permanently incapacitated, and losses to the economy caused by diverting resources from investments in future economic capacity
by maintaining a level of military preparedness sufficient to deter aggressors. Peacetime defense economics focuses on issues of allocation of resources between the military and civilian sectors, the relative size and character of the various armed forces, and the choice and design of their weapons.

* * *

Introduction

      field of national economic management concerned with the economic effects of military expenditure, the management of economics in wartime (war finance), and the management of peacetime military budgets.

Opportunities foregone: the cost of war
      There is no such thing as an inexpensive war. First, there is the human cost in loss of life and in the physical and psychological maiming of healthy people. While the personal cost of such loss is immeasurable, the economic (economics) cost to society can be estimated. This measure was first proposed by a French economist, Jean-Baptiste Say (Say, J.-B), in 1803. He asserted the principle that war costs more than its direct expenses, for it also costs what its casualties (military and civilian) would have earned throughout their lifetimes if they had never participated in war.

      Second, war has economic costs arising from the destruction of buildings, productive farmlands and forests, public services such as waterworks, electricity-generating and distribution systems, roads, bridges, harbours, and airfields, and all manner of personal and corporate property such as homes, possessions, factories, machinery, vehicles, and aircraft. War, therefore, destroys physical capital that has been created by previous economic activity.

      Reconstruction after war is a particular economic burden because the finance, imported capital goods, and labour used in reconstruction merely restore the losses a country has sustained, rather than adding to the stock of capital available to its economy. Thus, even if it manages to restore all its physical losses, it uses scarce resources that would otherwise have been available for extending and improving economic activity. As most wars since 1945 have occurred in the Third World, some of the world's poorest countries have suffered the most from the economic losses of war.

      War also costs a great deal in goods and services to create the weapons of war and to supply the people engaged in the war effort. The diversion of these goods and services—which range from the metals and chemicals transformed into weapons to the food, clothing, and shelter for the armed forces—reduces current civilian consumption, which lowers the population's living standards. Metal used to make a tank cannot be used to build bridges, fuel used to transport military supplies cannot be used on school buses, cement used to construct ammunition dumps cannot be used in house construction. This constitutes the opportunity cost of war—that is, the extent to which the economy foregoes the opportunity to commit these resources to alternative peaceful uses.

      The opportunity cost of war is also felt in the future. In addition to allocating resources to consumption (the satisfaction of current needs), an economy allocates resources to investment (the new factories and machinery that produce tomorrow's goods and services). Resources diverted to war cannot be used to create new productive capacity for future consumption, and this reduces the living standards of the population below what they otherwise would have been in the future.

      In summary, the total costs of war include the cost of the foregone use of the economic resources used up in the conflict. These include the cost of the foregone lifetime earnings of those killed in the war, the cost of lifetime medical care for those permanently incapacitated by the war, the cost of replacing the physical capital destroyed or damaged by the war, the cost of supplying the armed forces with the weapons of war, the cost of sustaining the armed forces and those in support functions (including their pay and pensions), and the losses to the economy caused by the diversion of resources from peaceful investment in future economic capacity.

Defense expenditure: the cost of deterrence
      As war is expensive, countries aim to avoid its costs and remain independent within sovereign borders. In the absence of a universally binding and verifiable agreement to abolish war, the best option is to deter those countries prone, by their history or by the policies of their governments, to resolve disputes by resorting to war. Deterrence has two aspects. First, by allocating resources for a minimum level of military capability, a nation ensures that it can resist an attack by a potential aggressor and severely damage the aggressor's economy and territory. In this way the costs to the aggressor of initiating a war will far exceed any likely gains. Second, by making credible its willingness to use military force, should it prove necessary to do so, the nation aims to leave potential aggressors in no doubt of the consequences they will suffer if they are tempted to launch an attack.

      Deterrence, while expensive, is incomparably less expensive than war. The study of its expense constitutes the subject matter of defense economics.

Measuring the burden
      Adam Smith (Smith, Adam), the founder of economics as a discipline in the social sciences, was the first economist to theorize about the economics of war. In his major work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith considered a perennial problem of defense management, namely, the increasing expense of war-fighting equipment. He noted that changing technology raised the costs of war—for example, that the musket was a more expensive item to acquire than its predecessor, the javelin. (In the same way, a modern jet fighter is much more expensive than its propeller-driven predecessor.)

      The rising cost of weapon technology does not mean that defense costs (d) necessarily rise as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP; the sum of all expenditures made in one year). The d/GDP ratio is a measure of the military burden, and evidence suggests that this burden has not risen through time (in high-income economies it has been falling for most of the post-World War II decades). Although the unit costs of specific weapons rise as technology adds to their capabilities, high-cost solutions to one form of a military threat (for example, the use of expensive tanks to defend against a massed tank attack) usually become vulnerable to low-cost alternatives (such as the relatively cheap antitank missile and precision-guided munitions), which either alter the nature of the threat or make redundant the high-cost solution.

      In a developed economy, the annual costs of defense procurement and logistics typically take up more than half of the defense budget, the rest being spent on personnel. In the underdeveloped economies, the balance is reversed: most of the annual costs (70–90 percent) are spent on personnel, with the remainder spent on procurement and logistics. This difference reflects the gap in available war-fighting technology between the developed and the underdeveloped worlds. The bulk of the world's defense spending is accounted for by the high-income economies (the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union), primarily because of the cost of high-technology weapon systems. Yet most wars are fought in low-income countries between relatively poorly equipped armed forces. Moreover, the inability of low-income countries to maintain sophisticated weapons to the operational standards of their manufacturers fully explains the many logistical problems the armed forces of poor countries have faced in their wars. Importing sophisticated weapon systems does not guarantee a sophisticated defense capability if the support system (fuel, spares, ammunition, repairs, and overhaul procedures) is either less than satisfactory or less than adequately funded. Defense capability is inseparably linked to the cost of maintenance.

      Defense is a public good; that is, once deterrence is achieved, all citizens benefit from the avoidance of war and no citizen can be excluded from enjoying the benefits. People who could not be excluded from a public benefit would, if given the choice, rationally choose not to contribute toward its cost. In other words, they could “free ride” on the contributions of others. For this reason, defense in all countries is paid for by taxation, a burden that is borne by all citizens, and in all countries the military force considered necessary for deterrence is under the direct and exclusive control of the government.

Comparing burdens
Settling on a standard
      International comparisons of how governments arrange their defense spending are fraught with conceptual discrepancies. The defense burden of a country is measured by the d/GDP ratio, which indicates how much of the nation's resources are being allocated to defense each year, but different estimates of both d and GDP are possible, each giving a different d/GDP ratio. Capitalist (capitalism) economies, which use the GDP, measure economic activity differently from communist economies, which use a net material product (NMP) system. The NMP excludes many expenditures, including state administration and defense, normally included under GDP. This complicates comparisons between these systems.

      Defense expenditures themselves are subject to controversy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has agreed on a measure of defense activity to which it adheres when making comparisons of its members' defense burdens, but other countries follow different conventions. Some, largely low-income countries, exclude internal security expenditures, which can be relatively high, thus lowering their official d/GDP ratio. Others, such as the Soviet Union, exclude defense-related research and development, frontier guards, and paramilitary reserves, thereby reducing the nominal defense expenditure by up to 30 percent.

      Even if agreement could be reached on what constitutes defense expenditure, this would still leave countries with a measure denominated in their domestic currencies. For meaningful comparisons of the absolute amounts spent on defense, every country's defense expenditures would have to be reduced to a common currency. But the act of converting each currency into, for example, U.S. dollars could lead to distortions, because official exchange rates reflect official policies and not existing realities. Thus, two countries with similar amounts in dollars spent on defense, and therefore in balance in their defense capabilities, could face a growing imbalance in their dollar-based defense expenditures purely because one of their currencies has changed its exchange rate with the U.S. dollar.

      Comparisons of the absolute amounts each country spends on defense are prone to error and must always be used with caution. Nevertheless, because each country measures its defense spending and its GDP in its own currency, the d/GDP ratio is an acceptable measure of a country's defense burden. Ratios can be compared across countries and in different time periods. The d/GDP ratio rises rapidly during a major war—in Britain in 1944 the d/GDP ratio reached 60 percent—and it falls in periods of prolonged peace. A country raising its d/GDP ratio signals that it is concerned with security, in turn causing concern among countries likely to be affected.

Defense burdens worldwide
      Security expenditures for both external defense and internal law and order account for major shares of government expenditures. In many low-income countries, these expenditures often exceed 20–30 percent of the state budget (government budget) and more than 10 percent of the country's GDP. The higher-income countries, while spending higher absolute amounts on defense, tend to spend smaller proportions of state expenditure (under 15 percent) and smaller proportions of GDP (under 5 percent). Given the perilous security situation in the lower-income regions of the world, these discrepancies are understandable (if also regrettable in view of their other pressing needs).

      By looking at the actual defense burden of an individual country and comparing it with the norm for similar economies, analysts can infer localized circumstances that may be influencing the government's perceptions of security. For instance, a poor country with a very low d/GDP, or a rich country with a very high d/GDP, is behaving differently from the norm for similar economies. An economist would seek explanations for this in the perception of a threat indicated by the public statements of the government concerned. In the absence of such statements, or where public statements are contrary to the behaviour of the government (for example, if it is raising its d/GDP but publicly proclaiming its peaceful intentions and denying that it is threatened by, or is threatening, any other country), the economist would rely on the d/GDP as an indicator of true intentions. It is likely that the intelligence services of neighbouring countries would draw similar conclusions from the economic data.

      Within the higher-income countries there are notable differences in the amounts spent on defense. The United States and Britain have spent relatively high proportions (5 to 10 percent) of their GDP on defense since 1955, compared with Japan, which has spent less than 1 percent of GDP over the same period. Germany and France also have tended to spend a smaller proportion of their GDPs than Britain on defense (though the absolute amounts have been similar, since they have larger GDPs than Britain).

      The Japanese case is interesting because of the differences in economic achievement between Japan and the big defense spenders. Many economists believe that there is a connection between the amount of GDP spent on defense and a country's economic growth, investment, and living standards. Japan's limit of d/GDP to under 1 percent was a result of its defeat in World War II. There is no doubt that it benefited enormously from limited defense spending (particularly while it could free ride under the military protection of the United States), since resources not allocated to defense went into economic investment, to the direct benefit of civilian employment and output. However, at the same time Japan also spent much less (about half as much) of its GDP on general government expenditure (g) than the United States and western Europe. Whether it was the low d/GDP (1 percent) or the low g/GDP (9 percent) that allowed the resources for Japanese economic successes to be mobilized is arguable. A low g/GDP ratio implies a lower level of taxation than a high g/GDP. This releases a higher flow of savings into the economy, enabling higher investment ratios to be maintained. High rates of investment, which are associated with higher growth rates of GDP, characterized the Japanese post-war economy and are a more likely explanation for the Japanese economic success than its low d/GDP.

      The Soviet Union has long spent a high proportion of its national resources on defense. Estimates vary, but the consensus among Western economists is that Soviet d/GDP for much of the postwar period was around 14 percent. (The official Soviet d/GDP was 6 percent.) If defense spending competes with economic growth in the capitalist economies, contributing to inflation, low investment, and lower living standards, then it must have a devastating impact on poorer economies such as the Soviet Union. The need to compete with the United States at all technological levels across the weapons spectrum has been met at the cost of heavy distortions in the rest of the Soviet economy. This has compelled the Soviet Union to review its priorities and to consider whether its security is best assured by continually raising the military ante with the West or by living at some lower level of military tension with a reduced offensive military capability.

Defense management: budgeting deterrence
      “How much defense is enough defense?” is the great unanswerable question of defense economics. Those charged with preparing a defense capability tend to be more cautious about the level of capability than those who eventually have to pay for it. In fact, the very success of deterrence—a high probability of nonattack throughout a long period of peace—tends to reduce the amount of defense spending that the electorate considers necessary to achieve deterrence. Judging the appropriate level of military preparedness is not a science; it is a mixture of intelligent response to credible threats and of judicious, cautious preparation “just in case” this or that should arise. The managers of the armed forces tend to increase the contingencies they wish to prepare for, while skeptical taxpayers tend to question whether certain preparations are absolutely essential. In democracies this tension forms the permanent agenda of the defense debate.

Stocks and flows
      Defense expenditures are made on an annual basis, the government allocating so much of its total budget to personnel costs, so much to the procurement of weapon systems, and so much to general support. The pay and allowances of defense personnel are consumed within the year; that is, they spend their wages, allowances, and pensions on consumer goods and, in so doing, add to total demand in the economy. Procurement, on the other hand, is somewhat different. A tank lasts much longer than the single year in which it is purchased. Because it is supposed to last as long as it takes to become obsolescent, the tank becomes part of the country's permanent defense capability. That defense capability is, in economic terms, a stock, while the annual expenditure is called a flow.

      Even if, for some reason, a defense budget is reduced in a single year, a country's defense capability need not be reduced. The government can still draw on the stock paid for by previous defense budgets, which is manifested in its tanks, aircraft, ships, communications systems, trained personnel, and expertise in military affairs. Clearly, if the defense budget continues to be reduced every year, there will come a point at which the country's defense capability will decline through attrition as items of equipment become obsolete or beyond repair.

      The analogy is with a bath that is filling with water while the plughole is open. As water pours into the bath, water also drains from the plughole. It is the difference between the rates at which water flows in and out that determines whether the bath fills or empties. If the flows in and out are equal, the water level will remain constant. Likewise with defense capability: if the additions (flow in) to the stock of weapons matches the attrition (flow out) of the stock from all causes, then the country's defense capability will remain constant.

Measuring a threat: the example of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
      Budgeting a nation's defense capability is complicated, however, because defense capability is not determined unilaterally; it depends on the capability of the potential aggressor. The gap in military capability between any two countries is known as the threat, and estimates of the threat constitute the major input into defense planning.

      If a potential aggressor develops an advanced weapon system that effectively counters a weapon stocked by the defender, it will eventually threaten to overwhelm the latter's defenses. Likewise, a growth in the stock of weapons deployed by a potential aggressor can eventually have a similar effect in threatening to overwhelm the defender's smaller stocks. If the defending country does not invest in overcoming each new threat to its capability—by technology, new types of weapons, increasing the stock of current weapons, or all three options simultaneously—it will risk a reduction in the probability of nonattack—that is, its deterrence capability will be compromised.

The economics of nuclear deterrence
      Estimates of the threat of a Soviet invasion across the German border determined the nature of NATO's response for more than 40 years. While NATO planners considered their own forces to be technologically superior to the Soviet forces, they were nevertheless mindful that the Soviet Union had a decisive quantitative superiority in conventional forces (more tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, combat aircraft, and troops). The threat of a land-based invasion by Soviet forces, which the planners considered to be virtually unstoppable, led directly to the decision to deploy nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent against an invasion of western Europe.

      Nobody could survive a major nuclear war in Europe. The damage to the Soviet Union from an American nuclear strike would be matched only by the damage to the United States from a Soviet nuclear strike. Because each country has maintained sufficient nuclear forces to respond in kind to a first strike by the other, a nuclear exchange would be suicidal for both. Whatever the rhetoric, therefore, both countries have a strong interest in preventing war of any kind from breaking out on the continent of Europe. Literally, they are hostage to each other's behaviour, making Europe an unsafe place to start a war. This doctrine, known as “mutual assured destruction,” was given the appropriate acronym MAD.

      The consequences of MAD led NATO to adopt a policy known as “flexible response.” Rather than an all-or-nothing nuclear exchange, this envisaged a staged escalation of NATO's response to a Soviet invasion, based on containing the initial thrust of the Soviet forces and warning them of the consequences of further encroachment on NATO's territory. To underline the credibility of the threat of nuclear retaliation, NATO commanders were issued battlefield nuclear weapons, which NATO governments might or might not release for immediate use, with or without warning. Uncertainty about NATO's policy of probable first use of nuclear weapons was regarded as sufficient to make Europe an unsafe place for the Soviet Union to risk the consequences of a conventional war. As long as the risk of the horrendous consequences of a nuclear war exceeded the prospects of potential gain from launching an attack, the probability of nonattack on western Europe by the Soviet Union remained at an acceptable level.

The economics of conventional deterrence
      The possession of nuclear weapons by some NATO countries (the United States, Britain, and France) did not obviate the need for expenditure on conventional armed forces. To abandon conventional forces would risk having to use nuclear weapons as soon as the first Soviet forces crossed the German border or some naval incident occurred in any part of the world. This escalation from a small incident to the end of the world in one short step was unacceptable; hence, NATO countries invested resources in conventional capabilities in addition to nuclear weapons. These conventional forces aim to blunt a Soviet attack and give time for political processes to influence the Soviet government's decisions.

      Matching conventional forces to Soviet conventional capabilities had to take note of two facts: First, the Soviet Union had overwhelming superiority in conventional forces. Military doctrine holds that concentrating superior force at a single point can overwhelm the defense, and the Soviet Union had the capability to achieve such a strategic advantage at a time and place of its choosing. Second, while NATO had advantages in military technology, there was a constant effort by the Soviet Union to close the technological gap. Also, there is some point at which a quantitative advantage acquires a qualitative dimension, and this advantage cannot be neutralized solely by relying on a technological gap between the weapon systems themselves.

      Thus the paradox of NATO defense spending. The alliance was constantly trying to widen the technological gap to compensate for its disadvantage in numbers, while at the same time it was required to maintain large quantities of its existing systems to redress the ever-widening gap in numbers that the Soviet Union was believed to be creating across the German border. Whether to develop ever-new weapon systems to combat a closing of the technological gap by the Soviet Union as well as the sheer numbers of Soviet systems, or to concentrate on supplying the armed forces with duplicate copies of existing designs, has long been NATO's quandary.

Choosing weapon systems
      Since the 1960s there have been several attempts to impose some rationality upon defense planning. The complexity of weapons development has few parallels in civilian development. Working close to technological (military technology) frontiers (sometimes having to think beyond them) under management systems imbued with a public-sector rather than a commercial ethos, under government budgetary constraints and shifting political priorities, and subject to ever-changing estimates of the threat the system is designed to counter, has produced an expensive and time-consuming procurement system. Lead times of 18 to 25 years from initial concept to in-service production are not unknown in defense procurement.

      The need for more rational choices in weapon programs and in the deployment of scarce resources increased as the defense budgets grew in absolute size (though falling as a proportion of a growing GDP). The cost of errors in choice increases as the cost of a single weapon platform escalates, so that, with a new weapon system costing $10–40 billion, it is crucial not to find that it is not needed by the time it is in service, that the technology cannot be made to work, or that it has been made obsolete by new developments.

      The Polaris (Polaris missile) submarine-launched ballistic missile program, begun by the United States in 1956, was the first highly complex system that required new management techniques to be brought to successful completion. One technique—called program evaluation and review technique (PERT)—found civilian applications after it was invented by the U.S. Navy to build Polaris on time and under budget. Similarly, earlier techniques such as cost–benefit analysis (invented to cope with submarine hunting problems during World War II) and input–output analysis (a technique developed by the U.S. Air Force for identifying the critical parts of an economy to develop or damage) rapidly spread into civilian use and into most academic management programs.

      The first attempts to bring rational choice to the management of a defense budget coincided with the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Terms such as systems analysis, as well as planning, programming, and budgeting systems (PPBS) and functional costing, became common in defense management. Much of the intellectual capital invested in these techniques came from economists, whose discipline in costing options and marginal analysis provided them (if not always the defense managers they advised) a set of tools appropriate to the task.

      When decisions are made solely by the lobbying of special interests—such as the navy, air force, and army—the result is likely to be a constant compromise under which programs remain in the budget because of political considerations. Defense analysts attempt to force the military lobbyists to set specific objectives for their programs and to accept criteria by which the military value of the programs can be judged. Like many management fashions, PPBS and its associated techniques did not survive in their earliest forms, but they did establish the belief that analyzing, evaluating, and choosing rationally was superior to lobbying by bureaucrats and, sometimes, by corrupting commercial interests.

      This can be illustrated by the technique of functional costing. Ordinarily, most budgets are a listing of expenditures under various main headings—personnel, equipment, and supplies—and the total is approved through the political process. This type of budget is called an accountability budget because it accounts for defense expenditure, but it cannot inform the defense planner (or the taxpayer) how efficiently the defense department has spent the budget. Under functional costing, the objectives of a proposed military program are shown along with the costs of all the resources needed to fulfill each objective, irrespective of which armed service contributes to the activity.

      For example, under functional costing there is no navy budget that costs everything spent by the navy. There is instead a maritime defense budget, a deep-sea navy budget, a coastal defense budget, and so on. These budgets may include costed contributions from units of the navy, air force, and army, plus an assessment of the costs of support functions used to carry out the activities. If, for instance, it is proposed to add a longer-range aircraft to the maritime defense role, this can be costed, and, depending upon the importance of extending maritime defense compared to other objectives, an informed decision can be made on whether to allocate the incremental funds to the upgraded aircraft or to some other project supporting some other military activity. Deciding between marginal increases or decreases in expenditures across different functions, all of them linked to specified objectives, is an improvement over buying aircraft simply because it is the turn of the air force to get a big project approved by the government.

Conscript or volunteer
      Modern armed forces use either a voluntary recruitment scheme or a form of conscription to supply the people needed to staff the military. Each scheme has economic consequences.

      Conscription involves a period of compulsory military service for all eligible males, usually triggered by their date of birth. (In some countries, such as Israel, females are also required to undergo military service, though usually in a support rather than a combat role.) Conscription provides a pool of recruits at a low cost per head. The conscripts receive extremely low wages, well below what they would earn as civilians. This difference in earnings is a direct monetary loss to them and a loss to society, which loses the output they would produce if they remained civilians. Conscription offers a net saving only to the defense budget, although what is saved in personnel costs is largely spent in increased training costs. Conscript armies require much larger training programs than volunteer armies because the service life of a conscript (two or three years) is shorter than a volunteer's term of engagement (three to 15 years). Each new age group of conscripts has to be trained, diverting full-time soldiers from other duties as well as adding to overall costs.

      Volunteer armies cost more per head because their wages must be comparable in some degree to civilian wages. While a national emergency can induce people to volunteer, a peacetime recruit is influenced by the alternative incomes that can be earned as a civilian. Some people volunteer whatever the wages, and some volunteer because they are unemployed as civilians, but most evidence indicates that volunteer rates will fall if military wages fall too far below civilian wages. This is particularly true for volunteer officers, who take with them critical skills when they leave the armed forces for well-paid jobs as civilians.

      While volunteer armies cost more per head, they can cost less in total because they do not have to be as large as conscript armies. Although conscription is common across the three branches of the armed services, the proportion of regular volunteers to conscripts is smaller in the army and larger by far in the navy and air force. Ships and aircraft require more-skilled and better-educated personnel than infantry divisions, and the navy and air force in most countries tend to use conscripts only in less-skilled roles, reserving the command roles (pilots, captains, engineers, navigators) for volunteers. This pattern can be seen in many Latin-American military forces. In Israel, where conscription covers practically the entire population, the problem of retaining skilled recruits is met by extending the periods of military service through the civilian lifetimes of the recruits.

      All personnel policies are vulnerable to demography. The proportion of a nation's population that is made up of young people eligible by fitness and intelligence for military service sets a limit on how many can be conscripted or induced to volunteer. Conscript armies, which are cost-effective when there is a large pool of young people from which to choose, are particularly threatened by demographic changes that reduce the pool of potential recruits. As the birth rate appears to fall in higher-income economies over time, the prospect for mass conscript armies looks bleak. Switching to an all-volunteer force is a short-term alternative, although the decline in the recruitable age group will force up military wages as the armed forces compete with civilian employers for the same age group. Substituting technology for labour is another short-term solution. But it too has limitations, not the least of them the problem of recruiting from a shrinking age group a sufficiently educated and skilled labour pool to operate sophisticated military equipment.

War finance: when deterrence fails
      War is too serious, and too expensive, to be left to the whim of chance, yet throughout history many governments have been willing to engage in war if it suited their interests as they perceived them, and many have also been dragged into wars when cooler calculations might have encouraged them to remain at peace. It was out of the need to raise the finance to conduct wars that the earliest systems for collecting public finance developed.

      The practice of taxing the population to pay for war has a long history. In early nomadic societies, wars could be fought with little expense other than time and casualties. Nomadic (nomadism) horsemen engaged in war as an extension of their normal activities as herdsmen. If successful, the warriors plundered the defeated, who were either killed, sold, or scattered. With more-settled agricultural societies, wars could be fought between planting and harvest, the armies living off of the land or the pay of the king. In the feudal (feudalism) system each man had an obligation to fight if required by the lord of the manor, to whom the vassal owed his livelihood. Weapons were often the personal possessions of the warriors and were fashioned by themselves, their forebears, or craftsmen. As weapons improved in quality and ingenuity, special efforts to produce them had to be made—for which their producers were paid out of public funds, as were the soldiers to whom they were distributed. These expenses necessitated the collection of special funds, and thus the government turned to levies on the population to provide the resources.

      Where taxation alone was not sufficient to pay for a war, the king could resort to selling relief from feudal obligations (usually to prosperous cities), and to borrowing from rich individuals (who risked confiscation if they refused and not being paid back if they agreed). Most political crises in European history up to the 19th century arose from disputes over public finance, usually to pay for wars. The English Civil Wars of 1642–51 were a typical example of a bitter dispute between king and parliament over which had the powers of taxation.

      By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, warfare had ceased to be a localized affair with a few thousand soldiers engaged in a single decisive battle. Warfare had become a massive undertaking, often lasting months and years and involving armies of hundreds of thousands. The expense of war reached levels unheard of previously. The Royal Navy, for instance, employed 200,000 men in the 1790s alone. Out of the need to find new sources of revenue for the long war between Britain and France from 1793 to 1815, the British government introduced a temporary income tax to be levied on all persons earning above a high minimum income. The advantages of the system soon became evident, and income taxes were widely adopted as permanent sources of government revenue.

Borrowing (credit)
      The British government also discovered another source of revenue, the national debt. Whereas previous borrowings by monarchs were a great risk to the lender, under the national debt (public debt) scheme the government agreed to guarantee regular payment of interest to all persons who lent to it, either in perpetuity or for a fixed term. Holders of government bonds were also permitted to sell them, passing the right to the guaranteed income to the buyer. Again, the system was so successful that it was soon copied by other governments, not all of them as scrupulous in their repayments as they promised. War bonds featured strongly in the two world wars, and it was regarded as patriotic to use personal savings to purchase them—though most of the borrowing came from institutions.

      The new sources of war finance enabled the increased expense of war to be met—and, in the opinion of some economists, made it more likely that a government would embark on a war for less than good reason. If war had to be financed out of the current consumption of the population, natural limits would be set on war being undertaken lightly, but borrowing removed these limits. Though the population would be saddled with interest payments for decades to come, this cost was small and of long duration compared to the immediate cut in living standards that would have to be made to pay for a war in full.

War's consequences: inflation and recession
      A major modern war can divert from 40 to 60 percent of a country's GDP, and one object of war finance is to release within the economy the resources needed for the war effort without causing inflation. If the government merely prints money to pay for the resources it requires, it will bid up prices in competition with civilians. The alternative is to reduce civilian consumption by imposing taxes at levels sufficient to force consumers to forego bidding for goods and services. The income from taxes can then be applied by the government to bid for the resources released by its program.

      Taxation acts both to raise necessary finance and simultaneously to reduce aggregate demand, which releases the resources needed for the war effort. The war effort represents a substantial expansion of production, for which producers receive wages and profits. When these same producers attempt to spend their incomes, they face a diminished quantity of civilian goods available for purchase. They must either face rapidly rising prices (caused by excess money chasing insufficient goods), or they must restrain—or be restrained—from spending. A war economy therefore imposes higher taxes on wages and profits to reduce demand. War bonds and taxes provide finance for the war effort and reduce demand for civilian goods and services. To conduct a major war without such an austerity program risks inflation.

      If inflation is a risk during a war, recession is another risk at the end of it. The massive expansion in production to provide resources for the war effort, if suddenly contracted by the cancellation of all defense contracts, throws large numbers of people out of work. The unemployed reduce their consumer spending, causing further cuts in aggregate demand, which throws yet more people out of work.

      World War I was followed by recession. Because much of the war damage along the Western Front was confined to the vast, static battlefields across France, where the destruction was mainly human and the cost was mainly in war materials, there was no need for a massive reconstruction program. Also, the damage on the Eastern Front was swept behind the newly formed Soviet state, which for ideological reasons eschewed capitalist reconstruction. After the war factories closed down, removing a flow of wages and profits into the economy, the demobilization of troops put surplus labour into an economy that was already in recession.

      Recession was averted at the end of World War II by reconstruction of the cities and economies of western Europe and Japan. Reconstruction rapidly transformed the war economies into mass consumer economies supported by the pent-up demand that had been frustrated by the lack of civilian goods and by high taxes during the war. In Europe's case there was a transfer of capital from the United States through the Marshall Plan. As the war economies were dismantled, economic growth surged, and those countries that did best economically were those that dismantled their highly regulated, government-controlled war economies quickest (West Germany, for example). Those countries that were least successful in dismantling their regulated economies were the slowest to recover. Among these were Britain, which increased state intervention from 1946 to 1951, and the Soviet-controlled economies of eastern Europe, which went even further down the road of government-managed economies.

Gavin Kennedy

Additional Reading
Gavin Kennedy, Defence Economics (1983), is a general survey written for the nonspecialist and providing information on a broad spectrum of questions of military appropriations and expenditures. Historical studies include J.M. Winter (ed.), War and Economic Development (1975), addressing the economic consequences of war on the preindustrial economies of Europe; Gautam Sen, The Military Origins of Industrialization and International Trade Rivalry (1983), exploring the influence of military technology on the industrial development of Europe; and Emile Benoit, Defense and Economic Growth in Developing Countries (1973), challenging the assumption that defense spending is incompatible with economic growth and attempting to show that defense spending has actually assisted economic development in some Third World countries. Saadet Deger and Robert West (eds.), Defence, Security, and Development (1987), is a collection of articles by scholars from several countries who criticize Benoit's method and conclusions and provide a more complex assessment of the connection between economic growth and national security. A detailed study of governmental defense planning in poorer economies is presented in Stephanie G. Neuman (ed.), Defense Planning in Less-Industrialized States: The Middle East and South Asia (1984). For a view that defense spending inhibits economic performance, based on international comparative data and statistical analysis, see Robert W. Degrasse, Jr., Military Expansion, Economic Decline: The Impact of Military Spending on U.S. Economic Performance, expanded ed. (1983). Christian Schmidt (ed.), The Economics of Military Expenditures: Military Expenditures, Economic Growth, and Fluctuations (1987), collects papers by most of the world's leading specialists in defense economics, providing a rich agenda in the contribution of economic analysis to defense dilemmas.A rare comparative study of defense industries in both capitalist and communist economies of such countries as the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Italy, China, Israel, the United Kingdom, and some representatives of the Third World is provided in Nicole Ball and Milton Leitenberg (eds.), The Structure of the Defense Industry: An International Survey (1983). Gavin Kennedy

* * *


Universalium. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Нужен реферат?

Look at other dictionaries:

  • economics — /ek euh nom iks, ee keuh /, n. 1. (used with a sing. v.) the science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, or the material welfare of humankind. 2. (used with a pl. v.) financial considerations;… …   Universalium

  • defense — defenseless, adj. defenselessly, adv. defenselessness, n. /di fens / or, esp. for 7, 9, /dee fens/, n., v., defensed, defensing. n. 1. resistance against attack; protection: Two more regiments are needed for the defense of the city. 2. something… …   Universalium

  • Economics of Corruption — applies economic tools to the analysis of corruption. Rigorous study of corruption by economists commenced in 1980s. In 1968, Nobel laureate economist Gunner Myrdal found corruption almost a taboo (among economists) as research topic . Indeed it… …   Wikipedia

  • Defense — or defence (see ce/ se) may refer to: Tactics and strategy of defending against attack Defense (military) Defense (sports) Defender (association football) Defenceman (ice hockey) Biological defense (disambiguation) a Chess opening as created in… …   Wikipedia

  • Economics in One Lesson — is an introduction to free market economics written by Henry Hazlitt and published in 1946, based on Frédéric Bastiat s essay Ce qu on voit et ce qu on ne voit pas ( What is Seen and What is Not Seen ). The One Lesson is stated in Part One of the …   Wikipedia

  • Economics — This article is about the social science. For other uses, see Economics (disambiguation). For a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of economics. Economics …   Wikipedia

  • Defense Intelligence Agency — This article is about the United States agency. For other countries agencies, see Defence Intelligence Agency. DIA redirects here. For other uses, see Dia (disambiguation). Defense Intelligence Agency Seal of the DIA …   Wikipedia

  • Defense Manpower Data Center — The Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) serves under the Office of the Secretary of Defense to collate personnel, manpower, training, financial, and other data for the Department of Defense. This data catalogues the history of personnel in the… …   Wikipedia

  • Economics of fascism — The economics of fascism refers to the economic policies implemented by fascist governments. Fascism itself is a term used to refer to totalitarian nationalist and corporatist movements. [Heater, Derek Benjamin. 1967. Political Ideas in the… …   Wikipedia

  • Defense industrial base — The term defense industrial base, also known as the defense industrial and technological base, is used in political science to refer to a government s industrial assets that are of direct or indirect importance for the production of equipment for …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”