Last week’s peace deal between the Syrian Armed Forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces, if it holds, may have brought the Transitional Government’s ambition of stabilizing post-revolutionary Syria one step closer. Decisions made in the next few months—including those on military funding—will shape the conditions under which that happens.
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?
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.
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’.
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.
In January 2019 Venezuela’s opposition-led National Assembly swore in congressman Juan Guaidó as the country’s interim president. Guaidó’s claim to power is a severe blow against the already weakened government of Nicolás Maduro, whose re-election as president in May 2018 was widely rejected by the international community and deemed illegitimate by over 50 foreign governments.
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.