Military Spending in Sub-Saharan Africa: Some Evidence for 1967-85

This article is a contribution to the debate on the determinants and economic effects of military expenditure in less-developed economies. Recent empirical work has suggested that there is much to be gained from analysing groups of relatively homogeneous countries, and to this end it focuses on a sample of thirteen Sub-Saharan African countries over the period from 1967 to 1985. The econometric analysis uses data for the group of countries as a whole, a cross-sectional analysis of the country averages, and an analysis of the pooled country data. As regards the determinants of military spending, the results suggest that economic factors play an important role in determining the level of military burden across countries and over time for the sample as a whole. When the data are pooled, strategic factors such as wars, the size of the army and inertia become important. In a time-series analysis, military expenditure is also found to have a negative effect on economic development for the countries as a whole, through its negative indirect effects on human resource accumulation, investment allocations and the balance of payments. While this result is not found across countries, or when the data are pooled, the results still imply that there is no significant positive effect of military burden on economic growth. Together, these results show the value of attempting to capture both time-series and cross-sectional effects when analysing the determinants and economic effects of military spending and the value of dealing with relatively homogeneous groups of countries.