Related commentary: Military expenditure

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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’.

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