Economic Effects of Investment in Defense Research and Development and its Impact on Productivity in Developed Countries

This work is based on the hypothesis that a country’s technological development and innovation in the security and defense sector is a critical factor for developing high-tech industries and thus promoting the country’s competitiveness. This research seeks to establish a correlation between defense economics (DE), security investments in research and development (R & R&D), and the generation of value-added products in high-tech industries from 2009 to 2018, based on models used in the United States, China, and Japan. Quantitative, descriptive, and non-experimental research was implemented to conduct a statistical verification. This contributed to determining the connection between value-added productivity (VAP) indicators related to investments in R&D, the Competitiveness Index, value-added industries, and high-technology exports creating a correlation between the DE indicator and investments in research discovering positive relationships among these variables.