British researchers demonstrate the effectiveness of investment in the defense industry

When it comes to defense investment, and more particularly the acquisition of military equipment, it is common to see state investments in this area opposed in public discourse vis-à-vis the needs in other areas, most often education, health or the fight against poverty.

In fact, industrial defense investment is sometimes perceived as a shortfall in these other areas, all the more pressing as they have an immediate dimension in a large part of public opinion, while defense issues are now often very far from the concerns of the latter.

Since 2017, the work carried out in France around the Socle Défense program and the " Defense with positive valuation " economic approach has attempted to provide a different point of view, particularly at the level of political decision-makers, by putting into perspective, in a country like France, state spending within the defense industry and the economic returns that they generate, more particularly for the state budget, by evaluating the tax and social revenues that result from these investments and come in fact relieve the burden of this investment.

Unfortunately, even if the subject interested several deputies sensitive to defense issues, this approach has not, strictly speaking, generated a change of doctrine in this area in France, despite being the best placed country in Europe with its defense industry. global defense, weakly exposed to imports and relocations, and strongly exporting.

But a report published by British researchers from the University of Oxford could perhaps lead these same decision-makers to take more consideration of this approach. Indeed, academics have carried out an exhaustive study of the impact on the British economy of the company BAe Systems, the largest aeronautics and defense company in the country at the heart of the new GCAP program, and more particularly of the investments of the British state in the field of military aeronautics around the Eurofighter and Tempest programs.

Indeed, beyond a riot of figures around the investments made, the jobs created or the effort supported by the company in terms of training, certain key values ​​make it possible to consolidate the reasoning on which the demonstration of the budgetary return French is based.

Thus, researchers estimate that BAe's industrial and economic activity supports 132,000 full-time equivalent jobs in Great Britain each year, while the company itself has only 49,000 employees.

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