Investment, growth, and defense expenditure in the EU15: Revisiting the nexus using SIPRI’s new consistent dataset

Abstract

Using SIPRI’s new consistent database on military expenditure and employing a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) methodology, the article investigates the nexus between military expenditure and two key macroeconomic variables, namely growth rates and investment spending for the case of the EU15 countries over the period 1961–2014. The findings reported herein do not support the effective demand stimulation argument for military spending. Thus, they broadly confirm the results of earlier studies for the EU15 that used the previous version of the SIPRI dataset.