Online ISSN 2286-0266
Print ISSN 1223-0685
© 2024 Œconomica by ASE & SOREC
 
Petru-Răsvan IATAN
Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti
Current military conflicts, such as the war that broke out in Ukraine and other latent conflicts worldwide, have rendered economic perspectives on the issue much more necessary now, even more so than in the recent past. Unfortunately, various theoretical approaches of the libertarian, pro-market kind, which have been put forward over the past few decades, either remain unnoticed or are even deliberately ignored. Russia failed in its attempt to (at least partially) replicate the WW2 German blitzkrieg, while Ukraine has not yet managed to deliver a proper counter-offence as quickly and efficiently as it would have hoped. It stands to reason to assume that an overall lack of knowledge as to how to properly end a military conflict as quickly and with as few casualties as possible is a significant factor in this whole otherwise already extremely complicated context. This article aims to put forward a bi-dimensional economic solution to war, dealing with both the (national) economy side of the issue, as well as with the dimension of warfare economics. As such, through a methodologically (mainly) qualitative framework, the present paper attempts to make use of what the free-market economic literature has to say about human incentives during times of war, with the author’s academic contribution consisting in having contextualising said theoretical knowledge both into the national policy and the battlefield fire exchanges layers of the conflict.

ŒCONOMICA no. 2/2023
Keywords: economics, war economy, national defence, incentives, military spending, entrepreneurship
JEL: A12, B13, B53, H56, N40
The Free Market Perspective on the War Economy: Public Policies and the Role of Human Incentives [Perspectiva pieţei libere asupra economiei de război: politicile publice şi rolul stimulentelor umane]