Military Spending, Corruption, Persistence and Long Run Growth

This paper contributes to the analysis of the impact of military spending and corruption on economic growth, by considering not only the political dimension of corruption, distorting the allocation of resources to sectors, but also the impact on the efficiency of the bureaucratic environment. It does this by developing the model of Mauro (2004) in the context of an endogenous growth model to deal with corruption in the defence sector. It then uses data from the International Country Risk Guide to produce a novel measure of corruption that combines corruption within the political system, institutional strength, quality of bureaucracy and the degree of military participation in the country and estimates the model for a large panel of countries. The results suggest that both military spending (as a share of total government spending) and corruption have significant negative long run effects on output. As the model also suggests that multiple equilibria can exist, a comparison is made between high and low corruption groups of countries and clear differences are indeed found. This suggests that effort is needed to encourage and coerce high corruption and military spending countries, but low corruption and military spending countries are likely to need little attention.