Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/233719 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) [ISSN:] 1467-985X [Volume:] 184 [Issue:] 1 [Publisher:] Wiley [Place:] Hoboken, NJ [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 201-226
Publisher: 
Wiley, Hoboken, NJ
Abstract: 
In this paper, we analyse the network of international major conventional weapons (MCW) transfers from 1950 to 2016, based on data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The dataset consists of yearly bilateral arms transfers between pairs of countries, which allows us to conceive of the individual relationships as part of an overall trade network. For the analysis, we extend the separable temporal exponential random graph model (STERGM) to account for time-varying effects on both the network level (trade network) and the actor level (country effects). Our investigation enables the identification of potentially differing driving forces that influence the formation of new trade relationships versus the persistence of existing ones. In accordance with political economy models, we expect security- and network-related covariates to be most important for the formation of transfers, whereas repeated transfers should prevalently be determined by the importers’ market size and military spending. Our proposed modelling approach corroborates the hypothesis and quantifies the corresponding effects. Additionally, we subject the time-varying heterogeneity effects to a functional principal component analysis. This analysis serves as an exploratory tool and allows us to identify countries with exceptional increases or decreases in their tendency to import and export weapons.
Subjects: 
arms transfers
functional principal component analysis
generalized additive model
security and defence network
varying coefficient model
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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