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Recent studies emphasize the occurrence of conflict as a rational economic activity along with production and exchange. Agents are assumed to divide their efforts into fighting and productive activities, as commonly denoted by "guns" and "butter." This article tries to go beyond this "manichean" idea, assuming Boulding's concept of "integrative system." In particular, the article investigates whether a trade institution committed to free and fair trade could foster "peaceful" benefits for member countries. The analysis, produced in a very simplified world, counts as a founding pillar of the Contest Success Function. The results of the model suggest that in an institutionalized scenario, agents gain more both in terms of economic utility and in terms of peace than in "continuing conflict" and "obstructed trade" scenarios.

This short paper presents a theoretical analysis that is intended to throw light on some issues related to the supply of vaccines in a context where producer countries are involved in armed conflicts. We present a simple model which combines elements of Hirshleifer-style economic analysis of conflict and microeconomic modelling of oligopolistic markets. In particular, we apply a simple Cournot duopoly model to two producer countries. Findings show that world supply of vaccines is indirectly and negatively affected by the existence of armed conflicts in a producer country that is involved in an armed conflict. Yet such negative impact on supply also increases the world price. In brief, participation of producer countries in armed conflicts turns out to be detrimental for global supply of vaccines.

This paper investigates the impact of militarization on income inequality. The analysis is conducted on a panel of 40 European countries over the period 2000–2017. The degree of militarization of a country is captured by means of the Global Militarization Index (GMI) and we employ the Gini index as a measure of inequality. The main findings show that militarization and inequality are positively associated. The findings appear to be robust. We also consider control variables related to military commitment, namely (i) conscription; (ii) NATO membership; (iii) involvement in an armed conflict. Interestingly conscription appears to be negatively associated with income inequality whereas an armed conflict and NATO membership show the opposite sign. For sake of robustness, we undertake the same estimations on alternative samples of countries and results are confirmed. Eventually, to deal with the issue of endogeneity, we apply the Lewbel, IV–GMM approach and results are confirmed.

This article examines the impact of EDUMILEX, namely the ratio between investment in education and military expenditure, on economic performance. It uses panel data estimation methods for 60 countries over the period 2000–2018. The findings suggest the existence of a non-linear, cubic relationship between EDUMILEX and economic performance. In particular, EDUMILEX is positively associated with both GDP per capita and labor productivity. The results also show that the effect of EDUMILEX is heterogeneous across countries, with lower values of EDUMILEX required to increase economic performance in developed countries than developing ones.