What is it about?
I analyze the effect of increasingly tight EU fiscal rules on the kinds of defense spending that NATO and the EU both ask of their members. Those effects aren't good - as a country's EU "Fiscal Rules Index" (a measure of how well that country has integrated EU fiscal rules into its national practice) increase, overall spending and spending on equipment modernization decreases.
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Why is it important?
US President Donald Trump has focused on Transatlantic burden-sharing, but he is not the first US president to do so. But solving NATO's burden-sharing problem represents a difficult collective action problem - there are simply no easy solutions. Understanding the domestic and regional drivers of defense spending choices can help policy-makers know which buttons to press when. With such insights, allies can address the burden-sharing problem without breaking the alliance itself.
Perspectives
I am excited about the publication of this article. Defense spending, or the resources countries decide to allocate to and within defense budgets, is a grand strategic issue - not just a curiosity for defense economists! After having negotiated burden-sharing with allies for several years, I began to understand better how difficult it is to crack this tough problem. Like most such problems, it is multi-causal. This paper is one of several in which I try to get at those causes in ways that scholars have not yet done. I hope you'll find it interesting, and, if you're in the policy business, I hope you'll apply some of the findings to your work!
Jordan Becker
King's College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Accidental rivals? EU fiscal rules, NATO, and transatlantic burden-sharing, Journal of Peace Research, May 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0022343319829690.
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