Band 11, Heft 2

Richardson's action-reaction model of an arms race has prompted a considerable body of research that has attempted to empirically estimate such models. In general these attempts have been unsuccessful. This paper provides an extensive reconsideration of the estimation issues and using some recent developments in time-series econometrics, provides a comprehensive analysis of data for Greece and Turkey. It finds evidence of some form of cointegration between the military expenditures in both countries, but not of Richardson arms race type.

With the convergence of preferences for democracy and free markets in so many nations, the UN has a momentous opportunity to provide the infrastructure needed to attain international peace. Given that peace is a public good, its provision by the international community currently suffers from the problems associated with these commodities, in particular that of ``collective action." Namely, peacekeeping will entail ``free-riding," by member states of the international system. This leads to the underprovision of peacekeeping/peace-enforcing efforts. This article presents a market- based proposal to remedy this problem. The proposed changes to peacekeeping operations aim to discourage wealthier nations from vetoing missions of genuine humanitarian concern for fear of casualties to their troops. Second, it also more justly compensates low-income nations participating in operations. Thirdly, it corrects for the current tendency to use more weapons and less personnel, and finally and most importantly, it would reflect the preferences of the international community for different peacekeeping operations in a transparent manner.

Regional cooperation projects between countries in the Middle East are expected to provide benefits to all parties involved but their feasibility is subject to social, economic and political constraints. This article uses a database of planned projects in the last decade and tries to detect types of projects that are less sensitive to the constraints. A typology of projects shows the prevalence of two main groups. A first group of projects avoids constraints by focusing on relatively high micro-economic viability but with low intensity of cooperation: these are economic-business projects and some infrastructure projects that are based on mere coordination between countries and mostly implemented separately in a single country. A second group of projects are infrastructure and public services projects that involve a number of countries, and implementation through joint planning and management. We conclude that the response to the constraints for regional cooperation is found in the concentration in projects that do not require any intensive continuous contact between the populations, by choosing business projects that are implemented separately in each country, or public projects that are jointly implemented, but on the basis of cooperation between public officers, not necessarily the population.