" War and Economic History "

Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines

In every great war monetary calculation was disrupted by inflation.... The economic behavior of the belligerents was thereby led astray; the true consequences of the war were removed from their view. One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier." 1 "[Governments] know that their young men will readily sacrifice their lives and limbs and that their old men will readily sacrifice the lives and limbs of their sons and grandsons, and that their women will readily sacrifice the lives and limbs of their husbands, their sons, and their brothers in what they believe to be a noble cause, but they have a deadly fearsometimes, but not always, well founded-that women and old men will shrink from pinching the stomachs of themselves and the young children, so that warlike enthusiasm will decay if it once gets about that the association of war with abundance to eat, drink, and wear is delusive, and that there is still truth in the old motto of "Peace and plenty" ... True that to be pinched by high prices rather than by small money incomes and large taxes made the people rage in the first place against the persons who were supposed to profit and often did profit-most of them quite innocently-by the rise of prices instead of against Government... ." 2 "[T]he true costs of the war lie in the goods sphere: the used-up goods, the devastation of parts of the country, the loss of manpower, these are the real costs of war to the economies.... Like a huge conflagration the war has devoured a huge part of our national wealth, the economy has become poorer ... However, in money terms the economy has not become

Externality When the action of a nation (individual) affects the consumption or production opportunities available to another.

Journal of American History, 2013

How did economic and financial factors determine how America waged war in the twentieth century? This important new book exposes the influence of economics and finance on the questions of whether the nation should go to war, how wars would be fought, how resources would be mobilized, and the long-term consequences for the American economy. Ranging from the Spanish-American War to the Gulf War, Hugh Rockoff explores the ways in which war can provide unique opportunities for understanding the basic principles of economics as wars produce immense changes in monetary and fiscal policy and so provide a wealth of information about how these policies actually work. He shows that wars have been more costly to the United States than most Americans realize as a substantial reliance on borrowing from the public, money creation, and other strategies to finance America's war efforts have hidden the true cost of war.

2015

Having studied the ancient empires, achieving political and economic powers, have been hovered one of the most critical issues all the time for the nations. The strategies to secure those might be different, but the intension still stays the same: controlling the labor and capital markets. Reviewing the historical colonization, one would recognize that there is a significant correlation between the political power and economic power within the countries. Among all the explanations on the approaches to attain these ambitions, using conquest other nations to gain resources and new territory and labor force seems to be one the unfortunate motives in this discussion. In the current study, having analyzed the macro data, I claim the feasibility of a positive causal relationship between having wars abroad and government expenditure in the long run within the studied period in the United States. While in the investigated duration, war seems to have a positive effect on the personal consump...

Global Challenges: Peace and War, 2013

Memoria y Civilización: Anuario de Historia, 2006

Tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis, 2014

Most historians used to regard war as economically destructive. They focused on short-term damage to the economy, guided by archives that were dominated by documents related to reparation demands and offi cial statistics that did not take into account the black market and the rerouting of trade. Gradually, scholars began to acknowledge the positive role played by wartime stimuli with regard to state fi nances, innovative management and new industries. Wartime expenditure proved to have been an impetus for domestic production and demand. Wartime economic downturns often turned out to have been infl uenced by prewar economic trends. Over the last hundred years, the Eighty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War have all received new interpretations, as historians have gathered new data and shifted their focus to the effi ciency of governments and redistributive economic eff ects.

Journal of International Development, 1993

It is undeniable that wars impose enormous human, social and economic costs on the countries involved. It is equally true that wars, at the very least, undermine the process of development. Despite widespread recognition of these simple facts there is remarkably little economic analysis of the effects of war and of what can be done to mitigate these effects. This paper is a step towards reversing such neglect in economic literature. The paper outlines the routes through which war imposes human, development and economic costs. A typology of wars is presented and the available evidence on some 16 countries' experiences with war is reviewed. The routes through which wars impose costs are traced with a view to identifying some policy interventions that can mitigate the economic effects. Feasible policies include interventions which help to alleviate the impact of war, such as providing food and relief to maintain social services, and those which mitigate against long-term costs by, for example, maintaining infrastructure. There are no simple solutions, but economic analysis of wars can assist in the design of policies to reduce the developmental costs associated with wars.

Antipode, 2002

Whatever gains may come from fighting wars, economic growth is not among them. We examine the long-run impact of interstate conflict on real GDP per capita for a cross section of countries between 1960 and 2000. We construct a fatality-weighted conflict variable that accounts for both the severity and endogeneity of individual confrontations. We include our conflict measure in a deep determinants income regression in which we control for trade, institutions and geography. We find that a 10 percent increase in fatality-weighted conflict over the period 1960 to 2000 results in an average decrease of 1.2 to 1.6 percent in 2000 real GDP per capita.