Examining the ninth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/
This lecture opens with a discussion on government bond markets and World War II. As a military historian, this is not an approach I ever considered. Slide 3 is interesting. There is a noticeable decline in French government bond prices in the months leading up to May 1940 (the month the Germans actually invaded France). There is then a rather abrupt break in the graph.
Starting with slide 5 Dr. Spagat goes into a discussion of Angola and Jonas Savimbi (just to refresh your memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Savimbi). The interesting result is that (slide 19), the end of the Savimbi rebellion (as determined by the date of his death) “…was bad for the diamond companies operating in Angola”….and interestingly enough (slide 23): “An important conclusion from the study is that it might be wrong to assume that businesses operating in war-torn countries and the government officials in these countries are all automatically in favor of pace. Influential actors may actually benefit economically from the continuation of a war.”
Dr. Spagat these switches to the ETA and the Basque Independence Movement in Spain (slide 24). This was a very small movement (see slide 25). The conclusion (slide 33) is that “…terrorism has been costly for the Basque region of Spain.”
Then Dr. Spagat switches gears to comparing European economic growth to Chinese economic growth (slide 34) over the course of around 1800 years. This is using Angus Maddison’s figures, which was an effort to measure the world economy by country over the course of history. I just happen to have a copy of his book, The World Economy, sitting on my desk. Strongly recommend everyone own a copy. Anyhow, the discussion from slide 35-38 addresses a hypothesis by Voightlander and Voth (their paper is linked on slide 35) that “They claim that Europe had a lot more wars than China did and that this actually explains why Europe grew more than China.” I am not sure I buy into this suggestion, and am I not sure that Dr. Spagat does either, but it is an interesting viewpoint.
Anyhow, not sure what the main takeaway is from all this, but it is damn interesting.
The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%209.pdf
