Analysis ·
Most states that receive aid spend more on their armies
Among states that both receive development assistance and report military spending, more than four in ten spend more on the second than they receive of the first.
Development assistance and military spending are usually discussed as though they belonged to different sets of countries. Put both columns beside each other for the same state in the same year and that turns out not to hold.
In 2023, 99 states both received net official development assistance and reported military expenditure. 42 of them spent more on their armed forces than they received in aid.
| State | Military (US$) | Aid received (US$) | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Malaysia | 3,925,370,597 | 6,578,659 | 597× |
| Algeria | 18,322,550,284 | 202,314,987 | 91× |
| Thailand | 5,847,120,283 | 84,968,796 | 69× |
| Iran, Islamic Rep. | 10,759,694,340 | 240,743,408 | 45× |
| India | 82,509,152,616 | 2,376,562,012 | 35× |
| Brazil | 21,963,365,580 | 699,971,863 | 31× |
The states at the top of that table are not aid-dependent economies. They are large middle-income countries with substantial armed forces, for whom the aid line is a rounding error beside the defence line. Reading them as recipients misdescribes them; the assistance is real but marginal to the budget.
| State | Military (US$) | Aid received (US$) |
|---|---|---|
| Haiti | 10,584,784 | 1,077,659,424 |
| Gambia, The | 13,841,154 | 343,857,178 |
| Somalia, Fed. Rep. | 140,832,628 | 2,281,094,971 |
| Sierra Leone | 38,705,318 | 497,800,446 |
| Central African Republic | 60,749,326 | 737,595,642 |
At the other end are the states the word “recipient” actually describes, where assistance exceeds the entire defence budget several times over. Both groups appear in the same aid statistics and in most sentences about them; almost nothing else about their situations is comparable.
How this is calculated. Military expenditure is published as a percentage of GDP, so the cash figure here is that percentage applied to the same year’s GDP in current US dollars — two World Bank series multiplied together, which inherits the error in both. Aid is net official development assistance received, so a state repaying more than it receives can net to zero or below; those are excluded rather than shown as negative, which means this compares only states with positive net receipts.
Not every state reports military spending, and several of the largest militaries in the world receive no aid and so appear nowhere here. This is a statement about the 99 states that report both, not about the membership.
Where this page comes from
- World Bank Open Data — CC BY 4.0 · source