Record sums are being spent on the military in the world. According to a new report by the Stockholm institute SIPRI, the main reasons are inflation, the war in Ukraine and the American arms race with China.
The more problems and conflicts, the more money. That's the key finding of a report by the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released on Monday (April 24th).
Last year, a jump of 3,7 percent was recorded in defense spending, which is the largest annual jump since these data have been available.
"Whether economies perform better or worse than expected, the military receives more funding than in previous years, in fact than ever before in history," said SIPRI researcher Nan Tian, one of the report's authors.
This time it's no surprise. Since Russian tanks entered Ukraine, a number of European countries have announced record military spending.
In fact, NATO members have been spending more every year since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea.
"It seems that a number of European countries are now trying to strengthen all aspects of defense," adds Tjan to Deutsche Welle (DW). "Higher spending on the military is a signal to deter Russia."
More may be less
Nevertheless, although the total amount given to armies around the world last year exceeded the magical two trillion euros, the share of GDP spent on defense fell by 0,1 percent.
In the past ten years, numerous countries have started to spend significantly more on the military, for example China (63 percent more), India (47 percent), Israel (26 percent), but even there the percentage of the total GDP for defense has decreased.
This means that economic growth is outweighing the growth of military costs. It should be added that a large part of the increased costs is attributable to inflation.
For example, last year the German government announced a historic package of an additional hundred billion euros for the army. That amount is not included in the SIPRI report because nothing has been spent yet.
Due to inflation and economic growth, even with that amount, Berlin could fall short of NATO's goal of spending two percent of GDP on defense, the German Institute for Economics recently calculated.
In principle, more money does not mean that there are more tanks, submarines or fighter planes in the world. The expenses monitored by SIPRI include expenditures for salaries of soldiers and civilian personnel, as well as for uniforms and similar supplies.
Americans spend three times more than the Chinese
Lonely at the top, as always, is the United States of America (USA), which spent 877 billion dollars on the military last year - that's almost 40 percent of the world's defense spending.
Looking at the total US economy, this is a smaller share than ten years ago and especially than during the Cold War when about ten percent of GDP was spent on defense.
And yet, as Nan Tian says, those huge investments in the military allow the US to project power and "spread influence around the rest of the world."
In second place is China with 292 billion dollars. Regardless, many American analysts warn that China is a serious competitor in terms of military power, and that is why the US must spend even more.
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