MILITARY SPENDING AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN PAKISTAN: NEW EVIDENCE FROM ROLLING WINDOW APPROACH

Purpose: This paper re-investigates causality between military spending and economic growth by applying autoregressive distributed lag model or ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration. Furthermore, rolling window approach (RWA) to cointegration is also applied to confirm the established long run relation between the variables. The VECM Granger causality is used to detect the direction of causality between military spending and economic growth. Our empirical exercise indicated long run relationship between military spending and economic growth as confirmed by rolling window approach. Moreover, negative unidirectional causality is found running from defense spending to economic growth. This paper opens up new sights for policy-making authorities to sustain economic growth by curtailing defense spending.