Military Spending, Government Disarray, and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis

Recent years have seen a spate of empirical studies that have used cross-country regressions to examine a variety of possible determinants of long-term economic growth. The present study considers an additional, largely overlooked, explanatory variable: military spending. Consistent with Thompson’s (1974) hypothesis that enhanced national defense fosters economic growth by increasing the security of property rights, the military expenditures share of GDP is found to have a statistically significant positive impact on the growth rate of per capita GDP. This result is obtained for two alternative model specifications, a Barro-regression and a LISREL variant of that regression. The LISREL variant is motivated by Sala-i-Martin’s (1994) claim that the impact of government economic policies jointly, rather than extant government policies individually and separately, is "the phenomenon that really matters" for long-term economic growth.     

Futures in global space//www.models.gis.media : [BBR]1[/BBR]

Geographers deal with global and local space and their interrelationships and thus bring new insights, perspectives, and methods to global questions. This is appealing to futurists since the principle of ‘think globally-act locally’ has been an inspiration for many years. In this paper I explore how old and new approaches in geography, as well as new information technologies such as the World Wide Web (WWW) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), might contribute to global modeling. I briefly review also the history of global economy models to discover lessons for future attempts to construct global models, not least how prevailing paradigms and institutional expediency determine the intellectual effort, and its impact. I then describe some of the new directions being undertaken by global modelers, quantitative geographers and regional scientists in the 1990s, and the possibilities and challenges for the next few years, and their contribution to the knowledge building process and its context.     

Pure vs. mixed commodity bundling

In the commodity bundling literature, pure bundling is ruled out as a uniquely optimal strategy because mixed bundling is always (weakly) better. This paper provides a theoretical distinction between the two pricing schemes. The distinction relies on the degree of consumer heterogeneity in reservation prices. While there is a lack of empirical evidence on commodity bundling pricing schemes due to the difficulties in measuring consumer heterogeneity, we circumvent this problem by examining firm heterogeneity. Specifically, we use data from the newspaper industry in which some two edition newspaper firms are mixed bundlers and others are pure bundlers.     

Consumer life styles and market segmentation

Consumer behaviorists faced with the task of segmenting markets increasingly turn to the study of consumer life styles. The life style concept and its role in predicting consumer decisions are analyzed here. One methodology known as AIO or life style research has proven especially useful in identifying heavy users of specific product categories. Three representative AIO portraits—for beer, eye make-up, and bank credit cards—are outlined. An evaluation of life styles as a systems concept suggests bright prospects for presenting research findings to clients, formulating creative strategies, positioning products and services and selecting media. C. W. Post Center, L.I.U. Doubleday Advertising Co.