National Security, Income Inequality, and Economic Growth: A Cross-National Analysis

Abstract

The impact of the international environment on national development, economic performance, and income inequality is a major field of research within the dependency paradigm. While we do not want to dispute the legitimacy of such research, we want to break the near-monopoly of the dependency approach on world system-economic performance linkages. We want to investigate a different kind of linkage between world politics and economic growth or income inequality. Whereas most dependency theorists tend to argue that dependent or peripheral integration in the capitalist world economy by weak stated reduces long-run opportunities for economic growth and egalitarian redistribution of income, we focus on a proposition that almost certainly looks counterintuitive to some and morally unacceptable to others. Our basic proposition is: threats to national security promote economic growth as weel as an egalitarian distribution of income.