Abstract
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s military expenditure database is the only long-run, consistent dataset on military expenditure with global coverage. Even though SIPRI’s military expenditure data collection dates back almost to the organization’s beginning in 1966, until recently, consistent data series for most countries have only been available as from 1988 onward. As this article discusses, the history of SIPRI’s military expenditure project includes a number of breaks, the result of staff transitions and failures of record-keeping. As a result, reconstructing the data has been necessary on a number of occasions. The most recent such effort has now succeeded in extending the data backward from 1988 for the great majority of countries—in most cases at least to the 1960s, and for some countries as far back as 1959. This article sets out this history of advances, setbacks, and reconstructions and the methodologies used. In particular, the results of the latest reconstruction effort are presented, and thoughts for future developments laid out.
Highlights
Military expenditure data has been a core topic for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) ever since its establishment in 1966
The following sections describe the initial founding of the project, the first two reconstructions led by Elisabeth Sköns, and the most recent reconstruction led by Sam Perlo-Freeman
Its scale and ambition was necessarily limited, relying on sources already available in SIPRI’s archives, including media clippings, correspondence with data providers, questionnaire responses, official documents obtained from various sources, and reference works such as the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY) and the UN’s United Nations Statistical Yearbook (UNSY)
Summary
The Institute’s flagship publication, the SIPRI Yearbook, has included tables of military expenditure data in all but two volumes (1993 and 1994), until recently SIPRI’s online military expenditure database only provided data as from 1988 onward. In 2015, a reconstruction of the data before 1988 was completed, fulfilling a long-standing goal of the military expenditure project and meeting widespread demand among researchers for long data series on military expenditure This extended dataset, which in some cases goes back as far as 1949, and to at least 1957 for a majority of countries that were independent political entities at the time, is as available as a beta version on request from SIPRI. A budget priority rationale was added, i.e., that comparison of data on military and nonmilitary expenditure can be used as an indicator of governments’ political priorities between various purposes.
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