Examining the Military Spending Economic Growth Nexus in the Presence of Informality: Evidence from the Balkan Peninsula

This paper examines the military expenditure ( milex ) economic growth nexus, in selected Balkan and peripheral countries from 1990 to 2022, considering the presence of informality within an institutional framework. Specifically, we employ Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to formulate an index of informality and use the Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) and Fully-Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) methods to identify the long-run equilibria. To provide a more comprehensive insight, the study also incorporates two types of causality tests – Dumitrescu-Hurlin and Juodis et al. – to determine the direction of the relationships. Our findings indicate that in the long-run milex can be detrimental to economic growth whilst informality boosts it.