Despite the virus, global military spending increased by 2020, led by US | War Stories
The year 2020 was a major one in more than a decade, as some countries changed funding for the epidemic.
Global military spending rose 2.6% to $ 1.98 trillion last year as some countries changed their spending on the COVID-19 epidemic, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in a report released Monday.
The largest expenditures in 2020, which together accounted for 62% of global military spending, were the United States, China, India, Russia and the United Kingdom, according to the Swedish agency.
“We can confidently say that the epidemic did not have a significant impact on global warming in 2020,” said Diego Lopes da Silva, a SIPRI researcher and co-author of the report.
While global gross domestic product (GDP) declined as a result of globalization, military spending as a share of GDP reached nearly 2.4% in 2020, up from 2.2% in 2019.
The jump represents the largest annual increase since the 2009 financial crisis.
As a result, more and more NATO members have pursued a transatlantic security plan to spend at least two percent of their GDP on war, with 12 countries doing so in 2020 compared to nine in 2019.
However, other countries, such as Chile and South Korea, have completely changed some of the ways in which they spend their war time.
Several others including Brazil and Russia have spent far less money compared to the original 2020 war budgets.
US, China is wasting a lot of money
The worst offenders in the world so far were the US and China, with Washington accounting for 39 percent of total global military budget by 2020 and Beijing by 13%.
U.S. military spending reached $ 778bn last year, 4.4 percent more than in 2019.
It was the third consecutive year in the history of the US military, which coincided with the ten-year-old President of the United States, Donald Trump.
“This reflects the growing concerns of intimidation of rivals such as China and Russia, as well as efforts by Trump officials to bolster what they saw as the end of the U.S. military,” Alexandra Marksteiner, one of the authors of the report, said.
China’s second-largest currency is expected to reach $ 252bn by 2020, up 1.9% from last year.
China’s military spending has now increased for 26 consecutive years, the longest list undetected by any country on the SIPRI list.
