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NATO’s new alliance-wide spending target of 5 per cent of GDP sends a strong political message, but at what cost?

This backgrounder looks at the principles and sharing mechanisms for these direct funding arrangements, with a focus on transparency and accountability.

Both official development assistance and military spending have surged among OECD donor countries since February 2022. What role has Ukraine-related spending had in this rise and how have governments balanced spending priorities?

As national security strategies increasingly recognize human and environmental priorities, SIPRI and the UN Institute for Disarmament Research propose a more comprehensive approach to scrutinizing national security spending.

In the latest ranking of the world’s largest arms-producing and military services companies (the SIPRI Top 100), published in December 2022, two firms based in the United States—Peraton and Amentum—had recently been acquired by private equity firms. Both their arms sales were considered to have a high degree of uncertainty.

On 23 December 2022, the Japanese cabinet unveiled its 2023 budget for the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), totalling 6.8 trillion yen ($52 billion). The new budget is 26 per cent higher than the JSDF budget for 2022, the largest year-on-year nominal increase in planned military spending since at least 1952.

Japan is undergoing the most significant changes to its security strategy since the end of World War II. What is behind these changers, what do they mean for Indo-Pacific security, and what challenges lie ahead for their implementation?

As world leaders gather in New York for the opening of the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, far too many security key indicators are heading in a dangerous direction.

This backgrounder—in a first step towards addressing this gap—explores the practice of disaggregation in military budget reporting as one aspect of transparency in military expenditure.

A few days after Russia launched its first airstrikes against the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, the German Parliament convened for a special Sunday session. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took the floor and, within half an hour, did away with decades of political restraint and ushered in a new era of German foreign and security policy.

This SIPRI Topical Backgrounder presents data on the military aid given by the USA to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020.

Earlier this year, the United States-led ‘war on terror’ gained another African front line. In March, the USA added a Mozambican group known as Ansar al-Sunnah to its list of designated foreign terrorist organizations, giving it the name ‘ISIS-Mozambique’.

In November 2020, in the midst of the ‘second wave’ of COVID-19 and despite a projected 10.4 per cent decrease in the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product in 2020, the British Government announced a £16.5 billion budget boost for ‘defence’.

Autocracies are once again the global majority. The 2020 Democracy Report of the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-DEM), ‘Autocratization surges, resistance grows’, raises the alarm that while the world in 2019 was substantially more democratic than it was in the 1970s, an ongoing trend of autocratization may reverse this scenario.

As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s, could we witness a new phase of consolidation within the Western and Central European arms industry? This SIPRI Essay gives an early glimpse at where these three factors stand after the ‘great lockdown’. It proposes that the European arms industry may be at the outset of a larger consolidation movement.

According to SIPRI’s data, Russia spends less than might be inferred from the scale of its military activities and the size of its armed forces. The following answers to frequently asked questions explain the SIPRI figures for Russian military expenditure and how best to interpret them.

In September 2019, Chile enacted legislation to abolish its off-budget funding mechanism of arms acquisitions for its armed forces and replace it with a more transparent and accountable funding system.

This topical backgrounder puts a spotlight on armament developments in Saudi Arabia, the country with the highest levels of military spending and arms imports in the Middle East. It aims to contribute to the efforts by SIPRI to gain a better understanding of the impact of militarization on security, conflict, peace and development in the region.

On 20 October the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly will discuss the annual report by the UN Secretary-General containing military expenditure data submitted by UN member states. In keeping with the trend seen in recent years, the number of UN member states participating in the reporting process for 2017 is comparatively low. However, analysis by SIPRI indicates that many non-participating member states, including countries in sub-Saharan Africa, now release much of the relevant data into the public domain.

Off-budget expenditure is used to fund a large proportion of the arms purchases not captured in the current military expenditure data on South American countries. This topical backgrounder begins to address this issue, using Venezuela as the initial country case for improvement.

Brazil's military spendng decreased by 7.2% in 2016, which is related to the political and economic crises currently affecting the country.

SIPRI provides the only long-term, historically consistent series of military expenditure data with global coverage available today. This topical backgrounder looks at how and why SIPRI invests time in this endeavour.

As SIPRI launches its new extended military expenditure data, this blog post looks at longer-term regional trends in military spending.

The military is often one of the most corrupt sectors of government, with arms procurement particularly susceptible to corruption. Avoiding this requires transparency and accountability in military spending.

What else could the $1676 billion spent on global military expenditure in 2015 achieve?

On 5 March, the opening day of the annual National People’s Congress, China announced a 7.6 per cent increase in its National Defense budget for 2016—or a total of 954 billion yuan ($146 billion).

Germany is, once again, debating the future of its arms industry, with long-held state support for arms production within Germany appearing to crumble.

On 4 March the Chinese Government presented its 2014 budget to the National People's Congress (NPC), but it does not accurately represent the total amount spent by China on its military.

When governments are less than transparent about their military budgets, this has serious ramifications for democracy and security.

Despite research showing that military spending does not prevent wars, world military spending has been stable at roughly three per cent of global GDP since 1990.

The EU's attempt to fight the economic crisis by shifting research money to the defence sector is highly questionable.

The arms race to the bottom—when states willingly arm themselves even when evidence suggests they should disarm—has begun to shape states' military spending.