Defence spending and economic growth: Extended empirical analysis for the european union

Previous empirical studies on the defense spending-economic growth nexus such as Kollias et al. (2007), Mylonidis (2008), Dunne and Nikolaidou (2012) analyzed this relationship in the case of the EU15. This study extends the analysis with the inclusion of more EU members and investigates the long run causal ordering between the two variables. Findings reported herein are not uniformed across all EU members. It is also found that end of Cold War has significant negative impact on defense expenditures of former east-European countries