Identification and Ranking Factors Influencing Defense Budget: Political Economy of Defense Approach

In the pursuit of national security countries dedicate a large portion of their resources to the purpose of developing and maintaining the defense sector. Therefore, defense expenditure is regarded as an indicator of relative importance of military affairs in every country and. Understanding the determinants of defense budget has important implications as military spending is a key issue in post-conflict situations. It seems valuable to investigate in detail the determinants of these spending levels to explain why such a substantial amount of the limited national resources is often spent on defense sector. Hence, several factors were hypothesized as explanatory determinants of the defense budget and its changes over time. The potential factors have been deduced and constructed from various national and international studies of defense spending. To sum up, findings suggest Economic factors are important drivers of the military budget. Another significant driving force behind the military budget is political factors. The size of the military budget is also affected by strategic factors both at the regional and international levels. In order to determine the most influencing factors, an integrated approach using Consistent Fuzzy Preference Relations (CFPR) is proposed. Then, CFPR questionnaire was developed to survey and evaluate defense budget dimensions. The empirical results show that strategic factors as well as economic factors has utmost importance relative to another defense budget dimension.