Josselin Droff and Julien Malizard publish an article on the determinants of French defence spending in the journal Defence and Peace Economics.
Josselin Droff, a researcher at the Chair, and Julien Malizard, the Chair's deputy holder, are the authors of a publication published online by the journal Defence and Peace Economics. The article is entitled « Determinants of Defense Spending: The Role of Strategic Factors in France« .
This article looks at the main Determinants of French defence spending over the long term (1958-2017). In order to estimate the determinants of defence spending, the literature considers both economic and strategic factors such as conflicts, threats and alliances, and is based in particular on the pioneering work of Smith (1980, Economic Journal).
The approach adopted is original in that the authors concentrate on the strategic factors, including proxies for alliance membership and external threats. The analysis also includes transnational terrorism as an indicator of internal threats.
- The results show that French defence spending are positively linked to gross domestic product (GDP) and an increase of 1 % in GDP implies an increase in defence spending of between 0.536 and 0.619 %.
- The positive effect of total defence spending by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries refutes the hypothesis of free-rider behaviour and suggests, on the contrary, a degree of complementarity between alliance spending and French defence spending.
- Conflicts are also positively associated with French defence spending. This result is in line with research on the increase in security needs when tensions intensify between and within countries. External operations (approximated by a dummy) show a positive and significant effect, but with a smaller coefficient.
- Finally, the analysis shows that political colour (right/left) has no significant influence on French defence spending. This can be interpreted as the existence of a consensus between the political parties on the issue of defence spending during the 5th Republic.
These results are robust to the changes in specifications and defence policy observed after 1991. Thus, this contribution highlights that the fundamental determinants of defence policy in France are economic conditions.
Other work on French defence policy by researchers at the Chair has been published in the journal Defence and Peace Economics, particularly in a special issue coordinated by Julien Malizard published in 2019.
>> read the article <<
All the Chair's research on French defence policy is listed in the 2020 scientific review.
