How many peace initiatives does the world need? The military spending is overwhelming to any peace initiative.
Greed with an indifference to life is at work within the military industry.
United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (click here)
The SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) (click here) database on military expenditure covers 172 countries and contains consistent data for the period since 1988. Data for the most recent 10-year period are published in the SIPRI Yearbook. Data from 1988 is available in the SIPRI military expenditure database on-line. SIPRI provides the only long-term, historically consistent series of military expenditure data with global coverage available. SIPRI military expenditure data are based on a variety of open sources which are processed to achieve consistent time series and are as far as possible in accordance with the SIPRI definition of military expenditure. See also Sources and methods (click here) for SIPRI data on military expenditure....
From sources and methods:
...The choice of base year (the year in whose prices the data are expressed) also has a significant impact on cross-country comparisons of expenditure data because different national currencies vary against the dollar in different ways. For the current edition of the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, the base year has been updated to 2014. Between 2014 and 2015, the US$ has gone up against the currencies of several important major spenders, including the Euro, the Russian rouble and the Japanese Yen, as well as most other currencies. This means that figures for most other countries' military expenditure expressed in current (2015) US$ is significantly lower than when they are expressed in constant (2014) US$. As a result, the world total in current US$, of $1676 billion ($1.676 trillion US), is significantly lower than the figure in constant (2014) US$, of $1773 billion ($1.773 trillion US)....
$1.676 trillion US buys a lot of food, CLEAN water, housing, clothing and schools armed with school books.
