Long-run trends in military spending and personnel: four key facts from new data
How much do violent conflicts displace economic resources in times of war? Do most countries devote a large share of resources to maintain their armies even when they are not immersed in a critical conflict? How are military capabilities changing in the 21st century?
Here I answer these questions using data from several sources. I've structured the analysis around four 'key facts'.
1) Wars have a substantial impact on the allocation of economic resources
One way to gauge the extent to which violent conflict affects the allocation of resources in an economy is to look at how military spending, as a share of national output, changes across countries and time.
This is shown in the first chart below.
The two large spikes, marking the First and Second World Wars, are clearly the main feature here, reaching as much as 40% of national output.
If we look beyond these two spikes, we can see that there are also clear peaks for other major conflicts. Take the UK as an example: The chart shows peaks for the Crimean War (1853 – 1856) and the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902).
You can add and remove countries by using the options on the interactive chart.
The fact that wars affect the allocation of resources can also be measured via changes in the number of people actively involved in the military. As the chart below shows, estimates suggest that the British armed forces amounted to about 10% of the entire British population at the peak of the First and Second World Wars.
2) Most countries devote resources to their military even in the absence of conflict
How much do countries spend on the military in the absence of major violent conflict? The chart shown here focuses on Sweden, Brazil and Switzerland. As we can see, despite broad reductions in recent years, all these countries have kept levels of military spending close to 1% of GDP. In all these countries the level today is similar to what it was at the turn of the 20th century.
This illustrates a more general point: Most countries devote resources to their military even in the absence of conflict.
Indeed, if you switch to the 'map view' in this chart, you will see that the vast majority of countries in the world spend at least 1% of GDP in their military. (In the map view there is a slider that allows you to track changes over time.)
3) Military spending is shrinking relative to national incomes (but is increasing in absolute terms)
Is military spending going up or down?
This chart shows military spending as a share of GDP for several countries. We see that since the end of the Second World War, there is a broad negative trend in military budget shares across world regions.
However, a key point to keep in mind here is that since GDP has been growing around the world in recent decades, the decline in defence budget shares across the world does not imply lower military spending in absolute terms. In fact, total global military expenditure, in inflation-adjusted US dollars, has gone up substantially in recent decades. This, in turn, is partly the result of countries becoming larger in terms of population.
4) Armies are getting smaller relative to the civilian population (but in absolute terms they stay at a fairly constant level)
For the final point I want to make, let's turn to recent data on the size of military forces, in terms of people. Are armies larger or smaller today than a couple of decades ago?
The last chart plots armed forces personnel across countries and world regions. Again there is a broad negative trend in most countries. And these trends also hold if we look at the armed forces as share of labor force.
So, after the Second World War armies have been getting smaller relative to the civilian population. In terms of absolute size, however, the total number of people in the global armed forces has stayed relatively constant in the last two decades.
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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as:
Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2018) - “Long-run trends in military spending and personnel: four key facts from new data” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/military-long-run-spending-perspective' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-military-long-run-spending-perspective,
author = {Esteban Ortiz-Ospina},
title = {Long-run trends in military spending and personnel: four key facts from new data},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2018},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/military-long-run-spending-perspective}
}
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