MILITARY EXPENDITURES AND SOCIAL EXPENDITURES IN PAKISTAN: MYTHS AND REALITIES

Abstract

Welfare versus warfare is an ongoing discourse between conservatives favouring
military expenditures and the others advocating for the welfare spending. In Pakistan,
this debate is highly politicised as some people portray that defence budget takes the
bulk of federal budget and it is draining the social budget of Pakistan. However, such
arguments are mostly vague and sweeping due to inexact inferences derived from
wrong hypothesis and inaccurate or incomplete data. This paper tackles these myths
logically and scientifically using appropriate statistical tools with particular emphasis
on the Riff off theory. The study is based on a scrupulous investigation of the realities
of military expenditures of selected countries through a Time Series Analysis to
ascertain the magnitude of the total military expenditure of Pakistan as compared to
other countries. It clarifies the statistical relationship between the social and military
budgets with the help of Regression Analysis and Correlation Coefficient. The study
reveals many interesting veracities by busting various myths.