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Examines how defense spending affects economic development; uses the Mintz-Huang model. Finds no adverse affects in South Korea, but some in Taiwan when externalities are considered.

In this paper, we develop a theory on how economic development in South Korea has reshaped its foreign policy and examine the rising middle power's personnel contributions to the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations (PKOs) using a supply-side rational choice model. Not only do the results reaffirm economic development as the fundamental driving force of South Korea's growing contributions to UN PKOs, a handful of factors that influence South Korea's decision on UN PKO participation were also discovered. This study highlights an important approach to bridge our knowledge of the global peacekeeping endeavors and individual countries' self-interested calculation.

To investigate the direct and indirect effects of defense spending on economic growth, the authors develop a multilink (via investment, employment, and exports) defense-growth model and test it with U.S. data for the time period from 1951 to 2000. By doing so, they advance previous scholarship on the indirect effects of the defense-growth trade-off through both a theoretical and empirical investigation of multiple indirect channels. Using a nonlinear four-sector production function model that incorporates labor, capital, technology, and exports, they test the direct and indirect impacts of defense spending on growth. Defense spending has a negative, indirect effect on economic growth via investment and export while the direct impact on growth seems to be rather small. Nonmilitary government spending has economic effects on growth that are similar to those associated with military spending.

This book examines the changing national identities that are transforming East Asia - pushing China and Taiwan apart and toward a showdown, while propping up a weakened North Korea. Accomplished contributors analyze the dynamics and the U.S.'s policy response.

Since Nye's introduction of the soft power concept, there have been scholarly debates on whether it is real and how it works. Despite the vast volume of studies, there is a void in the literature on theoretically explaining and empirically testing if soft power can be generated without the support of hard power. To fill this gap in the literature, we developed two theoretical mechanisms that describe the mechanism of US soft power (great power) and Korean soft power (small country). We applied these theories to the US and Korean cases to demonstrate that (1) soft power across countries is not generated in the same way because countries do not have the same level of hard power; and (2) soft power can be generated without the support of hard power.

Despite a volume of studies on the relationship between power distribution, the onset of war, and the impact of alliance and differential economic growth rate on the incidence of war, there is no strong conclusion about the issues. We reexamined the relationship between these variables and found that the differential growth rates in alliance-making affect the likelihood of war. This theoretically makes sense because nations are likely to try to increase their allies before they go to war, especially compared to their foes. This small but important finding adds to the literature.

Abstract: Recent democratization in Third World countries has prompted many students in social science to reinvestigate the determinants for successful democratization. Extant empirical studies have traditionally utilized the universe of countries to test the correlation between socio-economic development and democracy. In this study, however, we limit our sample universe to those countries which have experienced attempts at democratic transition. Democratic transition can only be the result of an active attempt by elites and/or masses to overthrow non-democratic regimes. The sampling technique utilized in this study differs from other studies by changing theoretical focus away from a simple dichotomy of "democratic" or "non-democratic" outcomes to a statistically unexamined question of the transition process. Does socio-economic development encourage the actual process of regime change and not simply successful outcomes? While also finding support for the proposition that economic prosperity and social factors, such as education, contribute to successful democratization, our main contribution to the literature is in the examination of the presence of an initial transition attempt and then the success or failure of that attempt. As well, we test the data with a threshold model that allows us to ascertain the particular point in development at which a transition attempt will occur. In order to determine what factors really help successful democratization, we employed success or failure of democratic transition as our dependent variable instead of the level of democracy. Results reveal that only per capita income has a significant impact on influencing successful democratic installation.