For my mini-project I am trying to answer the question as to whether higher military spending contributes to lowering military deaths in a country’s armed forces. Overall, my hypothesis and general understanding is that investing in the military will produce technology and techniques that are created with the goal of preserving the military personnel. However, one outlier that I identified that prompted me to think about this topic is Russian expenditure in the war in Ukraine: its expenditure went up but their military deaths also went up, at a disproportional rate even though it has turned into a war economy.
+The first dataset that I will be using is the “Military Spending of Countries (1960-2019)” that is publicly available on Kaggle. This dataset provides a vast array of information regarding military expenditure of ~60 years of different world countries and regions, with the spending adjusted to the US dollar value in 2019. I will use the country, year, and expenditure data from this dataset in my project.
+ +The second dataset that I will be using was provided to me by Professor Bilen in class, which comes from Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). This project contains data on global organized violence and death as a result of armed conflict since 1970, and so it provides vast information regarding the death rates by country, year, and the associated types/reasons for military deaths. I find it pretty interesting and advanced in terms of the available data because certain military deaths or injuries occur outside of armed conflicts due to other risks associated with active military duty. It will be a very relevant data source since I will be able to merge this data using country and year variables, and compare the military expenditure to death rates to perform Exploratory Data Analysis.
+ +In terms of model specification, I plan to pursue inference using regression modelling. I plan to use a country’s military expenditure information to see if there is an effect on the military deaths. After talking with Professor Bilen about the potential “reverse causality” associiated with the research on the policing-crime rate research, I plan to focus on the effect that modern military technology has on the attempts to lower military death rates. I plan to discuss technologies such as drones, automated flying aircrafts, advanced tanks and multi-purpose wheeled vehicles etc, and discuss how investment in said technologies might lower death rates.
+The intended stakeholders for this project are governments, military leadership, as such research will allow them to understand whether their past and current spending strategies seem to be effective in terms of preserving the lives of their personnel, and if there is a necessity to change said strategy. Additionally, another huge stakeholder for this project are the taxpayers, since their money is going towards military expenditure, and it is the government’s responsibility to be using their money effectively and responsibly.
+Finally, the ethical, legal, and societal implications for this project are important in nature, as it is focusing on the preservation of human life, which is considered to be the most important quality of any living being. Therefore, if this research deems to produce significant results, it might contribute to the efforts of preserving human lives at the expense of higher military spending.
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