2019/06/18 by Brian Blankenship, Renanah Miles Joyce · 2 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Business #Defense, Military, and Policy Studies #Economic growth #Economics #Foreign policy #Government (linguistics) #Government procurement #International Development and Aid #International trade #Law #Marketing #Political science #Politics #Power (physics) #Procurement #Public Procurement and Policy #Public economics #Purchasing #Scholarship #Sociology #Typology
paper · doi:10.1177/0022002719854786
openalex publication_date 2019/06/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The literature on economic statecraft has long focused on the effectiveness of foreign aid and trade as tools of inducement. However, existing scholarship largely neglects the role played by government procurement. By choosing to purchase goods or hire labor in foreign states, governments can provide economic benefits for strategic ends. The United States in particular leverages its defense procurement as a foreign policy tool. We introduce a new data set of US government procurement using information on all contracts executed overseas from 2000 to 2015. We develop a typology of how states use procurement to achieve foreign policy goals—power projection, counterinsurgency, and development—and provide descriptive statistics to explore variation in spending across countries and over time. We illustrate the power of the contract data by using it to code US military access in Africa, assess the relationship between spending and economic growth, and test whether economic inducements can buy influence.