New tool enables more robust research on world military spending

Source citation:

• Barnum, M., Fariss, C. J., Markowitz, J. N., & Morales, G. (2025). Measuring arms: Introducing the Global Military Spending Dataset. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 69(2–3), 540–567.

In this article, Barnum et al. describe, validate, and make use of the Global Military Spending Dataset (GMSD) that they created to provide policymakers and scholars with reliable data about various nations’ military expenditures. It is meant to solve issues with existing datasets that contain estimates of international military spending levels. They often have missing values, contain discrepancies, or use different currencies or calculation methods, making them difficult to use together. To address these issues, the GMSD merges 76 different military expenditure variables from “the most comprehensive and complete set of published datasets on military spending ever assembled.” Of these, five are historical and regional datasets accessed through ICPSR’s member-funded archive: 1) Annual Data on Nine Economic and Military Characteristics of 78 Nations (SIRE NATDAT), 1948-1983, 2) Military Defense Expenditure Data, 1948-1970, 3) Political Systems Performance Data: Sweden, 1865-1967, 4) National Capability Data: Annual Series, 1950-1988, and 5) Words and Deeds in Soviet Military Expenditures, 1955-1983. The GMSD uses a new latent variable statistical model to estimate values for historical data that were previously missing, provides the ability to systematically account for measurement error, and serves as a central repository of harmonized spending variables, saving researchers from the labor-intensive task of manually converting different currencies and inflation bases.

Posted February 12, 2026