ABSTRACT
Economists contribute considerably to the study of military expenditures, particularly the study of its impact on economic growth, its determinants, and tradeoffs between military expenditures and other government expenditure categories. 1 But they have made a much smaller contribution to the study of the costs of armed conflict which is common, perhaps endemic, in developing countries. In each year of the 1980s and 1990s, there have been between 30 and 40 “major armed conflicts” 2 in progress. Until the breakup of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, virtually all such conflicts were located in the developing world. The vast majority were internal, typically occurring between governments and opponents aspiring to take over control of the state or to achieve some degree of autonomy.
