BONN (Armradio) — Armenia is ranked the first in Europe and third worldwide in the Global Militarisation Index (GMI) 2019 presented by Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC).
In this year’s Global Militarisation Indix ranking, the ten countries that provided the military with markedly large amounts of resources in relation are Israel, Singapore, Armenia, Cyprus, South Korea, Russia, Greece, Jordan, Belarus and Azerbaijan.
These countries allocate particularly high levels of resources to the military in comparison to other areas of society.
Every year, BICC’s Global Militarisation Index (GMI) presents the relative weight and importance of a country’s military apparatus in relation to its society as a whole. The GMI 2019 covers 154 states and is based on the latest available figures (in most cases data for 2018).
The index project is financially supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
The report compares, for example, a country’s military expenditure with its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its health expenditure.
It contrasts the total number of military and paramilitary forces in a country with the number of physicians.
Finally, it studies the number of heavy weapons available to a country’s armed forces. These and other indicators are used to determine a country’s ranking, which in turn makes it possible to measure the respective level of militarization in comparison to other countries.
1 comment
The article is remiss in its reporting. It doesn’t say why these countries invest so much in armaments. In Armenia’s case, it’s a matter of life and death. If the country is not in top military shape, its foe–Azerbaijan–would invade it. Azerbaijan already abuses peace by almost daily violations of the line of contact.