This paper considers the effect of corruption and military spending on economic growth, analysing both the direct impact of public spending and the effect of allocating resources between categories of public spending within the framework of an endogenous growth model. The model exhibits non-linearities as a result of the links between the components of public spending, corruption and economic growth. The main findings of the empirical analysis confirm the expectation that corruption and military burden lower the growth rate of gross domestic product per capita. They also suggest that when the effect of the complementarity between military spending and corruption is omitted, as in most studies, the impact of military burden on economic perfo...