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Presented at the “Disarm! For a Climate of Peace,” meeting held on September 30 – October 3, 2016 in Berlin and organized by the International Peace Bureau.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how China’s rapid growth and increasing resource dependence have changed its relationship with India and their respective defense strategies. In particular, we consider China's Belt and Road Initiative, India's “Act East” policy and the strategic and economic value of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea regions.

The authors find no econometric evidence of interactions between China and India’s military spending using a Richardson-Baumol arms race model. Likewise, in a cross-county panel data study of military spending, they find that China’s military spending has no independent effect on military spending in other countries. The authors also show that once wage costs and other sources of military inflation are accounted for, the pattern of real defense spending growth is much less intense than is suggested by nominal data. Nevertheless, they show that China has been undertaking intense military modernization with rapidly rising capital-labor ratios in its defense spending.

The authors find little evidence of a traditional arms race, but also show that China, and to a lesser extent India, have been realigning their military capabilities to these new security risks while maintaining overall military burden on the economy.

Econometric analysis is limited by data availability and is necessarily historical, whereas the security situation is very fluid and may change in the short term.

The paper identifies factors that are likely to influence China and India's attitudes to defense spending in the coming years.

The paper finds that there is not an arms race in the traditional sense but may be an arms race in terms of new technologies and military modernization.

This is a very much underexplored topic in economics. The authors take an interdisciplinary approach showing how economics tools can be used to help understand this important issue in international relations.

This paper aims to explore to what extent can the Saudi–US alliance endure, given the several challenges it has faced over the past decade. Using a conceptual framework from the alliance theory, the paper will trace the historical evolution of the alliance between the two countries, then will identify some of the challenges that have faced the alliance on both the regional and bilateral levels, and finally will assess the impact of these challenges on the resilience of the Saudi–US alliance.

This paper will use the alliance theory literature to analyze the challenges and the resilience of the Saudi–US relations.

The Saudi–US alliance has encountered several challenges in the past decade such as the Arab spring, the Iranian nuclear deal and the Civil War in Syria and Yemen. However, this alliance proved to be resilient, and the strategic partnership between the two countries managed to overcome these challenges.

The importance of this paper stems from the fact that the USA and the Saudi Arabia are two pivotal countries, and their relationship affects regional and international dynamics. The paper contributes to the literature on the Saudi–US bilateral relations as well as their views on recent regional issues such as the Arab Spring, the civil war in Yemen and Syria. Assessing the limits and potentials of the alliance between the two countries could also help us understand the future of regional developments in the Middle East.