Comparison of Eritrean and Ethiopian Military (Defense) Expenditures: 1993- 1997May 2, 1999Eritrea's military spending was excessive by any standard In the previous week I posted data comparing the Ethiopian and Eritrean defense expenditures. This was prompted by the Eritrean government;s denial that it was spending an excessive amount on its military, and devoting large amounts of scarce foreign currency to arms imports. The Eritrean government was responding to articles including, Eritrean Economy Dealt Heavy Blow By War by Alex Last of Reuters, and War Destroys Eritrean Economy by Julie Stewart of the Associated Press. In rebutting the Eritrean government's propaganda, I compared the Eritrean and Ethiopian defense budgets. However, for Ethiopia, I included the internal affairs budget in the defense expenditure, making it seem larger than it was. In the following tables, the defense budgets as reported in the respective 1998 IMF statistical appendices for each country are listed and compared to the current and total governmnent expenditures for each country. All these data are from the 1998 IMF statistical appendices. The tables show that the Eritrean defense spending exceeded Ethiopia's in 1995 and 1996 in absolute terms. In percentage terms the Eritrean military expenditure always exceeded Ethiopia's by a wide margin. (The percent is relative to current and total government expenditures). In addition, due to the Federal structure of the Ethiopian government, defense spending is the responsibility of the federal government. When including the regional budgets, (approximately 30% of the total Federal and regional expenditure) the percent of Ethiopian defense spending is even less. This comparison is probably the most appropriate, as Eritrea is a unitary state.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||