This study analyses government capital and recurrent spending outlays on sectors (education, health, defense agriculture and transport and communication) believed to be critical to the growth of the economy, for the period 1980 to 2014. The Error Correction Method was adopted to analyze the short-run impact of each spending division on the prosperity of the economy. The disaggregation into capi...

The rise in defense spending since 1998, which this year may surpass 100% in real terms, is unprecedented over a 48-year period. In real percentage term, it is nearly as large as the Kennedy-Johnson and Reagan surges combined. Whether one looks at the entire DoD budget or just that part not related to the wars, current spending is above the peak years of the Vietnam era and the Reagan years. Lo...

The 1990s was a period of remarkable progress in peaceful transition in the world, from South Africa to the former Soviet Union to, somewhat more tentatively, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Spending on the military plummeted almost 40% worldwide. Although tensions and a worrisome rise in militarism are still percolating in the world, our knowledge and practice of conflict resolution has ...

Do alliances allow states to share defense burdens and reduce military spending? Despite expectations that should lead decreased spending, the empirical record offers mixed findings. We argue not all are reliable; thus, only allies receive signals of reassurance will rely on external security subsequently their spending. Compared do additional signals, these reassured have greater confidence an...

The global financial crisis of 2008–09 has sent public debt on sharply higher trajectories, as governments have provided large-scale support to the financial system, implemented discretionary fiscal stimulus, and accommodated steep drops in tax revenue. With the economic recovery gradually taking hold, the focus is now shifting to fiscal “exit strategies.” Indeed, many countries are set to face...

The basic idea is to excise the bitcoin money generation formula, and otherwise apply bitcoin essentially “as is” over digital coins which are redeemable by the mint that minted them. This will preserve the bitcoin assured anonymity. The new bitcoin.BitMint solution will benefit from bitcoin’s double-spending prevention, and would otherwise enjoy all the benefits associated with money in a digi...

Security: Forging paper currency is difficult. Unfortunately, electronic currency is just data and is easily copied. Copying or double spending of electronic currency should be prevented or detected. Ideally the illegal creation, copying, and reuse of electronic cash should be unconditionally or computationally impossible. Some systems rely instead on post-fact detection and punishment of doubl...

In its FY2007 budget submission, the Department of Defense (DOD) proposed increases in Tricare enrollment fees, deductibles, and pharmacy co-payments for retired beneficiaries not yet eligible for Medicare. The raises were justified by DOD as necessary to constrain the growth of health care spending as a proportion of the overall defense budget in the next decade. Many beneficiaries argued that...

Investigations of the 'guns vs. butter' trade-off models of military spending have yielded surprisingly inauspicious results in spite of the intuitively appealing nature of the hypothesis that the more we spend on defense the less we can spend on social welfare, etc. This paper examines the standard specification of the tradeoff model and demonstrates that the lack of empirical success of this ...