ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the magnitude of military expenditure and deals with the macroeconomic relations providing a comparative analysis of the relationship between military spending and the unemployment rate in a number of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. It provides an empirical analysis of the employment effects of military spending by working at different levels of abstraction to answer different types of questions. The chapter considers the relationship between military burden and aggregate unemployment in the OECD. It also considers the problems involved in measuring the employment supported by military expenditures, providing some comparative results. The chapter discusses the problems of attempting to measure the likely effects of changes in military spending. Simple macroeconomic studies of the economic effects of military expenditure are useful but rather limited.
