Dataset of the Day: Military Spending and Demographic Pressures

My mom called me the other day and asked me if I knew how much the U.S. spends on the military. I said that I didn’t but I that could find out. “In fact”, I told her, “I can make a map of global spending on the military by country” (because Finder! and Maker! make it so easy!). So I found global data from the World Development Indicators database that gives Military Spending for each country as the percent of central government spending. I uploaded the data to Finder! and then made my map (and sent it to my mom of course).

Then I remembered that I had recently uploaded a dataset from The Fund for Peace. This dataset rates countries around the world on a total of 12 indicators. Taking a closer look at this dataset, I realized that the indicator Demographic Pressures, when mapped, seemed to have some correlation to the Military Spending map. The Demographic Pressures indicator takes into consideration the pressure on food supply and other resources, restrictive group settlement patterns, disputes relating to group settlement patterns, and pressures from a skewed population distribution. Countries are scored an a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 equals the most pressures.

So I took a closer look at both maps.

To view the datasets click here for Military Spending and here for the Failed States Index of 2008. To view the maps click here.

I found that of the top 20 military spending countries, 40% of those scored 8 or higher on Democratic Pressures and only 20% scored less than 5 (including the USA). Of the 20 countries that spend the least on the military, 50% scored less than 5 and only 5% scored 8 or higher.

 
It is evident in the map that the pattern of high military spending and high democratic pressures seems to be most prominent in the Middle East, Africa and in some areas of Asia. The areas of low military spending and low democratic pressures fall mostly in Europe.

While the pattern is evident, the reason for the pattern may not be so easy to determine. It may be related to government attention to military building instead of key internal problems. It may be that countries that have high population density also have large military infrastructure. It could also just be a regional phenomenon. Maybe readers have an even better theory (leave a comment!). Either way, it’s an interesting pattern and one that wouldn’t have necessarily been predicted.