The Political Dimensions of Military Spending and Debt Service in Southeast Asia
Although the imperatives of external debt service have led to a reduction in the size of defence budgets in most Third World countries, the impact of military spending cannot be understood separately from the political attractiveness of external borrowing in the 1970s. While the cumulative impact of defence expend itures has been to worsen Third World borrowers' debt levels and hamper their debt servicing efforts, this is of secondary importance compared to the low political capacity of many debtor governments to mobilize and redirect the human and material resources under their nominal control towards that end. Many Third World countries used much of the borrowed capital to fin ance current budget deficits, government consumption and arms imports. Generally, the four major Southeast Asian borrowers ? Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand ? did not use foreign capital to finance their budget deficits, but appear to have invested some borrowed funds in domestic defence indus tries. One result is an apparent arms import-substitution effect: their arms imports actually declined as a percentage of total imports even as their external debt increased. Thus, their arms imports do not impair their debt service performance the way they have worsened the debt service problems of heavily indebted Third World countries elsewhere.
Pakistan, Defense Expenditures and External Debt: Patterns of Causation and Constraint
Abstract : Increasing attention is being focused on the role of military expenditures in contributing to the external indebtedness of developing countries. Unfortunately, given the fungibility of funds, it is often difficult to find clear, statistically significant relationships between increases in defense expenditures and the subsequent expansion of foreign liabilities. These dilemmas are reflected in seemingly contradictory results produced by several recent studies of Pakistani borrowing in external markets. On the one hand, cross section analysis (Looney, 1987, 1989; Looney and Frederiksen, 1986) suggests that Pakistan as a relatively resource constrained country might be expected to resort to extensive borrowing to support its level of defense expenditures. On the other hand, time series analysis questions whether external borrowing has been a major factor in funding the country's expanded defense expenditures (Looney, 1991). If anything, this analysis suggests that foreign lender concern over Pakistan's defense expenditures have caused them to cut back on lending to that country.
Household economy and gendered labor in the 17th centurya.d. on Guam
Abstract The gendered division of labor in household economies is well known in documentary accounts of many societies, although archaeological evidence for it is often elusive. Our study compares ethnohistorical accounts of household organization with archaeological patterns at a 17th-century village on the island of Guam in the Marianas archipelago to determine if these different sources of evidence provide similar insights. We investigated archaeological assemblages from two latte (megalithic) buildings to document their economic activities. Unexpected differences in their assemblages revealed that economic activities varied between the two latte buildings. They were domiciles of a single economically integrated household, but their disparate functions likely signaled a gendered division of labor. This study reveals aspects of gendered labor that documentary accounts do not fully describe. Our findings suggest that the assumption that domestic buildings were functionally redundant in traditional societies must be tested on a case-by-case basis.