Gross Fixed Capital Formation - Weaponry in The 2008 Revision of The UNSNA

Weaponry in The 2008 Revision of The UNSNA

In the 1993 UNSNA standards (and earlier), offensive weaponry and their means of delivery were excluded from capital formation, regardless of the length of their service life. Conceptually, the UNSNA accounts regarded military assets as providing "defence services" only at the point of their acquisition. Arms expenditure regarded as intermediate consumption could, according to this accounting treatment, only refer to sales or exports in a different accounting period.

If weapons were sold during the same year or a quarter, this necessitated "counter-intuitive" entries in the accounts for government (a capital addition is cited as a capital deduction, and vice versa). The 2008 UNSNA revision therefore recommends that all military expenditure that meets general UNSNA criteria for capital formation (investment in goods which are used in production for more than one year) will be treated as capital formation. Weapons systems and military inventories will be separately distinguished within fixed capital formation and inventories .

This approach somewhat increases the measure of total GFCF and by implication the total GDP of arms-producing countries, because expenditures and sales of weaponry are very large, especially in the United States and Europe. According to the Swedish research institute SIPRI, global military expenditure by governments in 2008 is estimated to have totaled $1,464 billion, or approximately 2.4% of the value of world GDP in 2008, but arms expenditure is only one component of this expenditure. In 2007, the combined arms sales of the SIPRI Top 100 arms-producing companies reached $347 billion. According to SIPRI, forty-four US companies accounted for 61 per cent of the Top 100’s arms sales in 2007, while 32 West European companies accounted for 31 per cent of the sales. Russia, Japan, Israel and India accounted for most of the rest. Including US arms sales in US GDP would raise the measure by up to 1.8%.

The main original reasons for largely excluding military weaponry expenditures from total asset, investment and gross product measures were that military weaponry is used to destroy people and property, which is not value-adding production (although rebuilding destroyed assets can stimulate the economy), and/or that the relevant figures were a military secret. However, since military capital expenditures consume a large amount of tax money, and because it is difficult to hide expenditures on weaponry, it is nowadays argued that it is appropriate that those expenditures should be publicly accounted for.