It is widely accepted that military spending plays a structural role in the industrial geography of many countries. In market economies, current knowledge on the subject can be traced to the end of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War and a series of studies that linked U.S. military spending to the population and economic booms in the nation’s “sunbelt” and, simultaneously, to the deindustrialization of the former industrial heartland. Yet critical gaps in our knowledge remain, most notably regarding the hypothetical association between the spatial distribution of defense spending and recent spikes in socioeconomic inequality. Using defense contracting data from 1965-2021 and a variety of spatiotemporal statistical techniques, including a series of disaggregated mean center calculations, distributed-lag and autoregressive models, this study lays a foundation for understanding the military-industrial complex system in terms of the relationship between defense spending, industrial clustering, innovation, and skill-biased technological change. The study finds the geography of defense spending is a key lever in accelerating or mitigating socio-spatial inequality and the paper proposes retheorizing the system in terms of its strategic spatial response to different sources of national security threats (i.e., clustered or dispersed investment to address either growing domestic inequality or rising geopolitical threats).
Mots clés : Defense|Innovation|Spatial statistics|Spatial inequality|Cold War
A104093MO