Military Spending and Economic Growth in Turkey: A Wavelet Approach

This paper employs a wavelet approach to investigate the relationship between economic growth and military spending in a time-frequency domain for the case of Turkey. Turkey presents an interesting case for analysis of military spending and economic growth, as its geopolitical position and history of insurgencies and separatist violence oblige the country to devote an unusually large share of the central government budget to national defence. Timescale regression analysis reveals that military expenditures have significant negative effects on growth in per capita GDP at business cycles of 16 years and longer. Timescale Granger causality analysis indicates that per capita GDP growth responds to movements in military expenditures at business cycles of eight years and above and that this result is very significant. Wavelet coherency analysis corroborates these findings, indicating a significant negative long-run co-movement at business cycles of 16 years and longer. Thus, the neoclassical prediction that military spending may promote growth does not hold in the case of Turkey, at least in the long run. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that, in the long run, military spending has been leading rather than lagging economic growth.