An Appraisal of Defense Interdependence among the Middle Eastern Countries

This article deals mainly with an empirical appraisal of interdependence among the Middle Eastern countries and identifying the type of such interdependence within the 1995-2014 time period. For this purpose. A general model of defense expenditures including economic, social, strategic, political and military variables for the Middle Eastern nations have been designed and in order to appraise them, the Systemic Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) within the dynamic combined data has been used. The findings of the model show that in the long run, the average defense burden of the Middle Eastern countries has had a positive and significant effect on the defense burden of each of the regional nations, indicating the presence of an arms race among the regional countries in the Middle East. On this basis, with a one percent increase in the average defense burden, in the long run the defense
burden of each of the regional countries has seen an almost 0.35% rise.