Military Expenditures, External Threats and Economic Growth

Do military expenditures have impact on growth? Aizenman Glick (2006) found that this impact is positive in countries with good governance, where the external threat is significant. Our article shows that their results suffer from three limitations: (i) they are not robust to the most recent main database used; (ii) small changes in the time period of some variables change their results, and (iii) the authors' econometric specification is not adequate to their hypothesis. Using a 2SLS specification we reconfirm the authors' hypothesis.