Global Militarisation Index 2018

Report year 2018·Data year 2018

GMI score (higher means a heavier military weight)·Higher is worse — rank 1 is worst affected·Published by Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC)

33 data years (1990–2022) covering 121 to 162 countries — coverage grows because the Soviet successor states have no figures before 1992 and several Gulf states have gaps, which are stored as absences rather than zeroes. The index measures the weight of a country's military relative to its society: military spending against both GDP and health spending, and military and paramilitary personnel against both physicians and total population. Score and rank are BOTH published by BICC, so neither is derived here. ⚠ THE DIRECTION IS OUR FRAMING, NOT BICC'S. BICC presents the index neutrally, as a measure of relative weight rather than a verdict; this site's schema has no neutral option, so it is recorded as higher-is-worse on the reasoning that what the index counts is resources held by the military rather than by health and education. Read the scores as "more militarised", not automatically as "worse governed".

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