ABSTRACT
Fourth, our findings, which we prefer to report in the working paper edition to save space, raise a major issue/question about why governments of developing countries have higher shares of military expenditures than developed economies. Although the answer to this question is beyond the scope of this study, the correlation coefficients between military expenditures of each group of welfare regimes and total world military expenditures still provides a modest indication that one possible factor is due to arms races, in which developing countries are more likely to follow the world armament trend than developed countries. Another possible explanation is that since overall budgets of developing countries are small, the share of military expenditures is high. That means there is a ‘subsistence level’ of military spending that each country has to bear, which is not insignificant compared to total spending.
