An Assessment of the Relationship between Defence Expenditure and Sustainable Development in the Baltic Countries

As geopolitical instability increases and new threats emerge, a number of countries are increasing their respective allocations for defence expenditure in order to take greater responsibility for their citizens in terms of defending and protecting their values and way of life. Small states such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia must evaluate certain economic, political, and strategic factors when increasing their respective defence expenditure. While they do tend to increase expenditure on national defence matters, budgetary constraints often force them to cut funding in some civilian domains or to increase their borrowing on international markets. Therefore, the security and defence of small states must be addressed in an integrated way, taking into account economic, social, and environmental factors. The aim of this article is to assess the relationships between defence expenditure and sustainable development indicators during the period between 2000 and 2018 in the Baltic states. The authors of this article aimed to determine which sustainable development indicators have a significant impact upon a country’s expenditure when it comes to defence matters. The study was conducted using econometric methods, including Spearman’s correlation analysis and Automatic Linear Modelling (ALM). The research results revealed some differences amongst the Baltic countries. In Lithuania, the employment rate and R&D personnel as a share of the active population demonstrated a significant impact upon defence expenditure. In Latvia, defence expenditure was found to be affected by disposable household income per capita and environmental taxes as a share of total tax revenue. In Estonia, defence expenditure was mainly influenced by disposable household income per capita and energy import dependency. The study’s findings may be used to ensure both the security of the country and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Defence Expenditure–Government Debt Nexus in the Context of Sustainability in Selected Small European Union Countries

This paper explores the relationship between defence expenditure and government debt in small European Union countries that are members of NATO, such as Luxembourg, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, DRenmark, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The investigation used Eurostat data in relation to gross government debt, as well as NATO information regarding defence expenditure as a share of GDP and its distribution by main category for the period between 2005 and 2019. The authors applied descriptive statistics and methods of multivariate statistics: Spearman’s correlation, the ANOVA test, and Life tables. Taking into consideration the tendencies of variables in all examined countries, the results show that the share of defence expenditure in GDP correlates statistically significantly and negatively with government gross debt. Latvia, Slovakia, and Slovenia revealed statistically significant relationships between variables, while Luxembourg, Denmark and Lithuania insignificant. In Estonia, the relationship between variables is strong and positive. Additionally, the investigation shows that, whether for increasing defence expenditure or for stable or decreasing defence expenditure, the trajectories of government debt have no clear interrelation in explored countries. Therefore, the cause of government debt by means of defence expenditure alone can only be partially explained. The insights that were drawn from this study could be applied to government finance management processes, as well as to ensure both national security and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals 2030.

Australia budget keeps defence spending commitments

Significance With an election due soon, the governing Liberal-National Coalition’s pledge to ring-fence the defence spending commitments made in 2016 was under some pressure. However, defence spending in fiscal year 2021/22 will grow by over 4% in real terms and stay above the symbolic level of 2% of GDP. Impacts Growing popular and bipartisan concern with Chinese aggression is a conducive environment for increased defence spending. Low interest rates and a stronger Australian dollar are also supporting sustained levels of defence expenditure. Washington may increase pressure on Australia to conduct freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea. Major business groups are concerned that increased criticism of China in national politics will produce yet more punitive backlash.

National Defence Expenditure and Its Implications on Economic Development in Nigeria

The issue of security is presently a critical challenge for the Nigeria State: biggest democracy in Africa as reports of killings are plastered on a daily basis on both print and social media. This is unpalatable for a developing country like Nigeria that has its eyes set on improving the lot of its citizens and becoming a force to reckon with in the global economy. It is on this backdrop that this study set sail to examine the association between national defence expenditure and economic development in Nigeria. The study adopted Ex-post facto research design as the variables- Misery Index, CDEX and RDEX: cannot be manipulated as they are annual time series data sourced from the World Development Indicator and the Central Bank of Nigeria annual report from a period of 38 years covering from 1981 to 2018, which were in turn analyzed using the error correction model (ECM) method of estimation. The result of the Johansen cointegration test revealed that government capital spending on defence, recurrent spending on defence, foreign direct investment and misery index have common trends in the long run. The outcome of the normalized cointegration disclosed a negative and significant relationship between government capital spending on defence and misery index, while a positive and significant long run relationship exists between government recurrent spending on defence and misery index. The short run analysis pointed to a positive and significant relationship between previous year’s misery index and current year’s misery index. The study thus recommended that government defence spending be reassessed to make it development oriented and proper monitoring of defence spending be carried out.

Evidential Analysis of Terrorism and I-VEO Knowledge Matrix in the Context of Security as Pure Public Good: The case of Pakistan from 1990 to 2010

The case of Pakistan has presented if security provision is a pure public good in the light of the I-VEO Knowledge Matrix hypotheses. Evidential analysis of the data from 1990 to 2010 from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) suggests that terrorism incidents are not reduced with the increase of public expenditure on defence, and instead, more fatalities and injuries are witnessed during the years. The analysis is based in isolation to terrorist attacks, defence expenditure and relating hypotheses of Influential Violent Extremists Organization Knowledge Matrix (I- VEO Knowledge Matrix) and counterterrorism operations, at ceteris paribus. The I-VEO Knowledge Matrix shows there is a lack of a comprehensive set of strategy based on the collection of relevant hypotheses more productive than the existing and likely less effective counterterrorism strategies to ensure security provision as a pure public good in the case of Pakistan

A tale of five stories: Defence spending and economic growth in NATO´s countries

This article examines the relationship between defence expenditure and its impact on the growth of NATO’s countries between 2005 and 2018. The aim is to determine if this relation exists and to test if it is possible to discover different models across the countries. The results obtained using the Arellano–Bond estimator, suggest that there is more than one model, and confirm, through the poolability test, the existence of five different groups of countries within the Alliance, with different impacts of the defence expenditure on their gross domestic product. These findings are in line with the review of existing literature that reveals heterogeneity in the results due to different parameters used.