2023-04-24 12:23:08
The defense budget is breaking new records in Europe. In 2022, military spending on the Old Continent rose once more to its level at the end of the Cold War, according to a benchmark report published on Monday, April 24. Across continents, military spending hit a new high of $2.24 trillion last year, or 2.2% of global GDP, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). . “They are pulled by the war in Ukraine, which is pushing up European budgets, but also by the unresolved and growing tensions in East Asia” between China on one side and, on the other, the United States and its Asian allies, underlines the researcher Nan Tian, one of the co-authors of the study.
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The Old Continent spent, following deducting inflation, 13% more on its armies in a year marked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the report. This is both the strongest growth recorded for more than thirty years, and the return – in constant dollars – to the level of expenditure of 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
$480 billion
Ukraine alone increased its spending sevenfold, which jumped to $44 billion – a third of its GDP. And this, without counting several tens of billions of armament donations from abroad, specifies the Sipri. Russian spending has increased by 9.2%, according to his estimates. Spending in Europe, which reached $480 billion in 2022, has already increased by more than a third in ten years, and the trend is expected to continue to accelerate in the next decade.
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After falling considerably in the 1990s, global military spending had been on the rise since the 2000s. It had been initially driven by major investments by China in its army, then by renewed tensions with the Russia following the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The United States alone accounted for 39% of global spending last year. With China, number 2 (13%), they represent more than half of the world’s military investments.
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