Investigating the impact of regional economic integration on Interstate Military Conflicts: Evidence from 1980-2000 Military Interstate Dispute Data

• Main Authors: Benito, Katherine Alyssa T., Chuacokiong, Jacqueline W., Jimenez, Golda Margarett S., Lim, Richmond R.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2010
• Subjects: International economic integration
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/14731
• Institution: De La Salle University

Lee and Pyun (2009) find that both bilateral and multilateral trade reduces military disputes between neighboring and distant countries respectively. Their findings coincide with the conventional wisdom that trade promotes peace however they made no attempt to discuss the impact of regional economic integration to military conflict. Thus in this paper, we argue that although regional economic integration deters conflict within the region, it does not do so with respect to countries outside the region since it decreases the opportunity cost of bilateral war with countries outside the region. We use dyadic conflict data from the Correlates of War project as our dependent variable and utilize three methodologies namely multinational logit, ordinal logit and binominal logit analysis involving panel data to determine whether regional economic integration and some added variables increase the probability of interstate military conflict.