David Gold had a nice piece on multipliers in a recent Dollars and Sense. The official military budget is not all that big relative to GDP, but nobody knows how big the actual budget is. Some bioweapons stuff is in agriculture; nukes are in the energy department ....
On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 07:23:20AM +0200, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: > Is there any recent serious literature on the "multiplier effect" of > military expenditure ? One can strike a ratio between military budgets and > GDP etc., but it is virtually impossible to isolate a specifically military > industry from net output data, since there are relatively few contractors > whose only output is military hardware, they would produce for civil uses as > well. According to some sources, military expenditure is around 3-4 percent > of GDP in the USA, but other sources suggest a much higher figure (?). This > percentage is relatively low, relative to many other countries, but total > GDP is much larger, so the total amount of money involved is vastly larger. > > J. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
