Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Geostrategic power index - variable 1: Military expenditures

The first variable visualized and included in the calculation of my geostrategic power index is military expenditures for all countries of the world. This is an imperfect way to reflect military power and power projection capabilities of countries but i feel it is too complicated to even try counting tanks, fighter planes, warships etc as it would be impossible to quantify and make comparisons over the quality and capabilities of different types of weapon systems. So military expenditures will have to serve as an imperfect reflection of the technical sophistication and capability of armed forces.
The Military expenditure map visualizes annual military expenditures in Billion USD and as a share in % of annual total world military expenditures, for each country by clicking on the corresponding bubble. 
The map also shows that the world centroid or center of gravity for military expenditure is located in Hudson Bay, Canada. Not so odd given that the USA "contributes" almost 40 % of the worlds military expenditures currently. 

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