Does military spending affect inequality in South Africa? A revisit

Abstract

Previous investigations on the military spending-inequality nexus (in South Africa) were underpinned by the assumption that military spending and inequality behaves in symmetric fashion and employed linear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model in their analysis. This paper extends and improves upon prior studies by investigating the short-run and long-run asymmetric effect of military spending on South Africa’s income inequality. Using annual data from 1980 to 2017 and the asymmetric autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model by Shin et al. (2014), our paper revisits the military spending-income inequality nexus. We find evidence to suggest an asymmetric association between military and income inequality—income inequality responds differently to positive and negative shocks of military spending in the long- and short-run. Based on these findings, we conclude that the NARDL model delivers more accurate estimates and provides nuanced insights that the traditional linear ARDL.