Financial versus human resources in the Greek-Turkish arms race: A forecasting investigation using artificial neural networks

This paper aims at forecasting the burden on the Greek economy resulting fr om the arms race against Turkey and at concentrating on the leading determi nants of this burden. The military debt and the defence share of GDP are em ployed alternatively in order to approximate the measurement of the arms ra ce pressure on Greece, and the method used is that of artificial neural net works. The use of a wide variety of explanatory variables in combination wi th the promising results derived, suggest that the impact on the Greek econ omy resulting from this arms race is determined, to a large extent, by demo graphic factors which strongly favour the Turkish side. Prediction on both miltary debt and defence expenditure exhibited highly satisfactory accuracy , while the estimation of input significance, indicates that variables desc ribing the Turkish side are often dominant over the corresponding Greek one s.