Military spending in Europe returned in 2022 to magnitudes not seen after the Cold Wardriven by the conflict in Ukraine, according to a report released on Monday by the Stockholm International Institute for Peace Research (Sipri).
Europe was the continent that registered the highest year-on-year rise in the purchase of arms, 13%which together with the increase in tensions in East Asia contributed to the fact that world spending will reach a record figure of 2.2 trillion dollars (2 trillion euros), 3.7% more year-on-year in real terms (double excluding inflation) and the equivalent of 2.2% of global gross domestic product (GDP).
Global defense budget items had a significant increase “due to the war in Ukraine,” which pushed up those on the European continent, “and the increasingly serious tensions in East Asia between the United States and China,” he told the AFP researcher Nan Tian, one of the study authors.
Global defense budget items had a significant increase due to the war in Ukraine
In 2022, a year marked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European countries spent on average, after adjusting for inflation, 13% more on their armies than in 2021.
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This is the largest increase in more than 30 years and if the total amount is calculated in constant dollars (minus the effect of inflation), it reaches the same level of spending as in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.
The report highlights that 345,000 million dollars (315,000 million euros) were spent in Central and Western Europe, 30% more than in 2013 and a figure that exceeds that of 1989 for the first time, coinciding with the end of the Cold War.
Finland, with 36% more, Lithuania (27%), Sweden (12%) and Poland (11%) experienced the largest increases in the military budget, and the plans launched by several countries suggest that spending in the area will continue to grow in the future, highlights Sipri.
“While the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 certainly affected spending decisions in 2022, concerns about Russian aggression have been building long before that. Many former Eastern Bloc countries have doubled their military spending since 2014“, writes this prestigious institute.
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Russia, third on the world list, raised its military investment by 9.2% to close to 86,400 million (78,860 million euros), 4.1% of its GDP, while Ukraine experienced a record increase of 640%, 34 % of its GDP, not counting donations received from other countries.
“European spending has risen quite a bit, even if the two warring nations are excluded (from the calculations),” Tian said.
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The countries with the most military spending
Despite the increases registered in Europe and other areas, The United States maintains its indisputable dominance worldwide: it spent 877,000 million dollars (880,469 million euros), 39% of the total and three times more than China, the second on the list.
That figure represents an increase of 0.7% compared to 2021, which would be “much higher” if the country had not registered the highest inflation since 1981, and was driven by the “unprecedented” level of military aid to Ukraine.
“China has been investing more and more in its naval forces as a way to extend its reach towards Taiwan, of course, and then beyond the South China Sea,” Tian said.
The 19,900 million allocated last year by the US to Ukraine represent the largest amount in military aid to a country since the Cold War, explains Sipri, but it represents only 2.3% of total US military spending.
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India, with 6% more, and Saudi Arabia, with 16%, complete the top five places in annual spending, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea and Japan, with Ukraine in eleventh place, twenty-five places higher than in 2021.
Spain drops one place to sixteenth, with an expense of 20,300 million (18,500 million euros), 7.3% more than in 2021, just ahead of Brazil.
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The report also highlights the rise registered in Asia and Oceania, driven by China and Japan, with respective increases in the last year of 4.2% and 1.1%, which in the case of the latter is the highest since 1960.
In Central America and the Caribbean there was a fall of 6.2%, driven by a drop of almost ten points in military spending in Mexico, while in South America the decrease in spending was 6.1%, in this case due to the drop in Brazilian investment.
*With EFE and AFP
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