Interwar US and Japanese National Product and Defense Expenditure

摘要

This report is a technical supplement to the report, Military Transformation as a Competitive Systemic Process: The Case of Japan and the United States Between the World Wars, by William D. 0' Neil (CRM D00086l6.Al, June 2003). It surveys available data on the economic resources of Japan and the United States in the period between the world wars and their allocation to defense purposes. Various comparative measures are derived. In general terms, the economy of the United States was roughly seven times as large as that of Japan. However, because Japan devoted a much greater proportion of its national product to defense, the amount it spent on defense between the wars was roughly equivalent to that of the U.S.