Military Spending Research Paper

Military Spending

Before you can even begin to look and compare opportunity costs in each country you need to understand exactly what it means. According to Investopedia.com opportunity cost is defined as, “The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.” In government we see this when one economic issue takes precedent over another financially. I will show examples of this throughout this essay.
(Format) Country, GDP, Military Spending, Military Spend*(100pct) / GDP, GDP/Population
USA, $14.66 trillion, $595 billion, 4.06%, $47,200
Russia, $2.22 trillion, $86 billion, 3.9%, $15,900
Japan, $4.31 trillion, $34 billion,
0.8%, $34,000
Brazil, $2.17 trillion, $37 billion, 1.7%, $10,800
North Korea, $40 billion, $10 billion (est.), 25 %( est.), $1,800

These numbers are meant to give you a comparison among different countries on how the country is using money for military spending.
In the above examples we are looking at numbers and percentages that are being used to fund our military instead of things like education, medical, research, etc. For example, if the US government spends $595bn on the war in Iraq, it is $595bn they cannot spend on education, health care or cutting taxes / reducing budget deficit.
We can draw many different conclusions based on the numbers above, one being that the U.S GDP numbers are significantly higher; the amount of military spending is also significantly higher along with the percentages. One reason for this is that the US has more money to spend and all in all is a wealthier country. We can look at the other economic states of each country and try to add a correlation between them all, Russia has about the same percentages as the US but is about 12.4Tn less in GDP than the US. Japan is only spending .8% on Military but we all know that they are also limited and have heavy restrictions on what they are allowed to spend. Brazil and North Korea are two countries that are very hard to analyze because most of the data given does not give direct correlation of one another so in my opinion we can only really compare USA, Russia and possibly
Japan.
The question that I ask myself is if this money is really needed for the military to fully function. Before stating my opinion is will show what my research has given me. Many economists state that spending money for military purposes is detrimental to the economy, for it results in a competition for scarce, non-renewable resources and investment. Opportunity cost assessments have revealed the consequences of expanded defense spending. It is expensive, due to the pre-empting of resources, therefore fewer funds available for investing in socioeconomic development. The positive effects of health, education and social spending are reduced. After researching how the money is divided among different areas of the military I found that 59% of the US military budget is spent on R & D (Research and Development). In fact, when comparing the expenditure and labor costs per GNP of Japan and US, Military R&D is almost nonexistent in Japan but non-military R & D is high in Japan. Due to all of these we see that productivity rates of the civilian sector are lowered due to the diversion of capital. This lowered productivity has resulted in a lower GDP and standard of living, not only for US here in the United States but for other Countries like Russia and other countries that spend such high amounts on the military.