This is a
list of countries by military expenditures per year using the latest information available. Some of the information is from the
United States'
Central Intelligence Agency's
World Factbook.
Note that for some countries, no information was available to the World Factbook's compilers; these countries were omitted from the list. Consequently, the total world expenditure on armed forces is likely to be somewhat higher than that given. Moreover, spending figures is not based on the same year for all countries with some updated with more recent figures and some relying on older figures and therefore the rank may be misleading.
Comparisons between figures in this table should be used with caution. There are comparison issues inherent with these figures for example France, Italy and Spain include in their defence expenditures the costs of maintaining the Gendarmerie, Carabinieri and Guardia Civil- all of which are primarily domestic police forces. On the other hand some countries account military expenses under other budget voices for example China, Mexico and Russia categorize spending on nuclear weapons, missile and fighter development as scientific expenses, spending on training are categorized under the education budget, and veteran pensions are afforded by welfare budget. The United States list spending on nuclear weapons under the budget for the Department of Energy, and much of the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded through emergency supplemental appropriations bills.
Note that this data is typically compiled by attempting to compute the local currency military expenditures, and then converting them at market exchange rates into a common currency. Therefore changes in the currency markets can cause a nations estimated military expenditures to change, even if that nation's budget remains constant. For developing economies, including China and India, this will result a smaller estimate than if the conversion were done using purchasing power parity. The differences can be substantial. For example, the Chinese Renminbi has a market price of 6.992 per US dollar at the market exchange rate, and an estimated purchasing power parity conversion of 3.694[1]. Using the purchasing power conversion would almost double the estimate of China's military expenditure. On the other hand, converting its entire military budget using a single purchasing power equivalent would be dramatically misleading, as many elements of the budget are not amenable to such a conversion and/or do not share the same conversion factor. For example, typical international commodities such as steel, copper, oil, used in the construction of various military equipment, high tech basic research, and foreign military purchases.
