Alex Mintz

Defense Expenditures, Economic Growth and the 'Peace Dividend"

Recent developments in Eastern Europe have created expectations of a “peace dividend†associated with reduced levels of U.S. defense expenditures. We present and empirically estimate a two-equation model for assessing the direct and indirect, immediate and delayed effects of changes in defense spending on economic growth in the United States.

How Do Leaders Make Decisions

Poliheuristic theory (PH) bridges the gap between cognitive and rational theories of decision making. PH postulates a two-stage decision process. During the first stage, the set of possible options is reduced by applying a “noncompensatory principle” to eliminate any alternative with an unacceptable return on a critical, typically political, decision dimension. Once the choice set has been reduced to alternatives that are acceptable to the decision maker, the process moves to a second stage, during which the decision maker uses more analytic processing in an attempt to minimize risks and maximize benefits. In this article, the author applies poliheuristic theory to individual, sequential, and interactive decision settings. Subsequent articles in this issue offer theoretical extensions and multiple tests of the theory using multiple methods (formal, statistical, experimental).

Defense Expenditures, Economic Growth, and The “Peace Dividend”: A Longitudinal Analysis of 103 Countries

Despite the proliferation of studies on the impact of military spending on economic growth, it is still not known whether defense spending hinders or promotes growth. Most analysts attribute the lack of consistent/robust findings to three problems: the lack of a sound theory of defense-growth trade-offs, an inadequate research design, and a failure to account for the externality effects that defense spending might have on other parts of the economy. In this study, the authors try to remedy these problems by (1) relying on a model of the defense-growth trade-off that is grounded in the neoclassic theory of growth, (2) estimating this model using time-series data on 103 countries, and (3) explicitly accounting for the externality effects of defense spending by the use of a multisectorial model. The results show that, regardless of the specification of the models, and contrary to most cross-national studies, military expenditures have a significant positive effect on growth in only about 10% of the cases.

The Decision to Attack Iraq

This article attempts to explain the decision to use force against Iraq using a noncompensatory theory of decision making. Rather than choosing an alternative that maximizes utility on the basis of a holistic comparison process as suggested by the expected utility model, or selecting an alternative that “satisfices” a certain criterion as predicted by the cybernetic model, the noncompensatory theory suggests that decisions on the use of force are often made based on the rejection of undesirable alternatives on the basis of one, or at most a few, criteria.

The Effect of Dynamic and Static Choice Sets on Political Decision Making: An Analysis Using the Decision Board Platform

Previous studies of political decision making have used only “static” choice sets, where alternatives are “fixed” and are a priori known to the decision maker. We assess the effect of a dynamic choice set (new alternatives appear during the decision process) on strategy selection and choice in international politics. We suggest that decision makers use a mixture of decision strategies when making decisions in a two-stage process consisting of an initial screening of available alternatives, and a selection of the best one from the subset of remaining alternatives. To test the effects of dynamic and static choice sets on the decision process we introduce a computer-based “process tracer” in a study of top-ranking officers in the U.S. Air Force. The results show that (1) national security decision makers use a mixture of strategies in arriving at a decision, and (2) strategy selection and choice are significantly influenced by the structure of the choice set (static versus dynamic).

Defence expenditures and economic growth: The externality effect

In a series of articles published in the Fall 1990 issue of Defence Economics Alexander (1990), Atesoglu and Mueller (1990) and Huang and Mintz (1990) have all specified and empirically estimated d...

Ridge regression analysis of the defence‐growth tradeoff in the United States

Multicollinearity is one of the major methodological problems in the study of the guns‐growth tradeoff. In this paper, we use ridge regression to separate the effects of individual variables influencing economic growth in the United States. Ridge is not a new method, but to the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of ridge regression to the study of national security or Defence and Peace Economics.

Foreign Policy Decision Making in Familiar and Unfamiliar Settings AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF HIGH-RANKING MILITARY OFFICERS

The concept of policy makers’ familiarity with a decision task has received considerable attention in recent years in the literature on decision making by analogy, intuitive decision making, and dynamic versus static decision making. The effect of familiarity on the decision strategy change of high-ranking officers of the U.S. Air Force is tested to see whether and how familiar versus unfamiliar decision tasks affect decision strategy change during the decision-making process. Results support the noncompensatory principle of political decision making and poliheuristic theory: Leaders are sensitive to negative political advice, which is often noncompensatory. They first use dimensions to eliminate noncompensatory alternatives and then evaluate acceptable alternatives. This two-stage process is even more pronounced in unfamiliar decision settings with low or high levels of ambiguity—a situation that characterizes many foreign policy crises.

Guns Versus Butter: A Disaggregated Analysis.

Irior studies of the guns-versus-butter trade-off have focused on total military expenditures and subcomponents of welfare spending (educa- tion, health, and housing). I extend the analysis to include the major subcomponents of the defense budget. The results are consistent with Claytons; Domke, Eichenberg, and Kellehers; and Russetts findings of a lack of defense-welfare trade-off in the 1947-80 era but reveal very specific trade-offs during the Reagan years.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MILITARY SPENDING IN ISRAEL

Irior scholarly analysis of Israeli military spending has focused on national security questions. We present a mathematical model incorporating security threats as well as electoral cycles and corporate profits. The parameters are estimated empirically. The results support the idea that in Israel the military budget at the margins is also employed as a political-economic instrument to help manage the economy and to provide a favorable election climate for incumbents. It is suggested that the political- economic dynamic widely attributed to Western industrialized societies may be of increasing importance in other societies throughout the world.