Presentation by Julien Malizard at the Association Française de Science Economique (AFSE) conference held in Lyon from Monday 16 to Wednesday 18 June.
«This article examines the main drivers of French defence expenditure between 1960 and 2010. France has to balance with two contradictory issues: strategic constraint and budgetary process. We assume that nonlinear approach is suitable to evaluate the demand function. Our results support latter assumption and we use time trend as transition function. Economic factors play a major role and considering the nonlinear pattern, we show that, before 1983, economic growth is inversely related to defence expenditure whereas the opposite occurs after this threshold. Strategic considerations exert a little impact.»
