Secrecy and military expenditures in the Russian budget

Erik Andermo and Martin Kragh

Post-Soviet Affairs, 2020, vol. 36, issue 4, 297-322

Abstract: This article proposes a transparent method for collecting, structuring, and analyzing Russian budget data on defense and security-related expenditures. A precise answer to the question of how big Russia’s defense expenditures are is impossible because of issues concerning secrecy and accounting principles. We circumvent this challenge by constructing lower and upper bounds for Russia’s military expenditure, showing that depending on the chosen measure these have increased from the range of 10.3–31.2% of federal expenditures in 2011 to 12.9–35.4% in 2018. The analysis also yields additional insights into the concept of secrecy in the Russian budget; we show that 39 out of 96 subchapters in the Russian budget contain secret expenditures, many of which are not nominally related to defense or security, and that secret expenditures increased as a share of total expenditures from 12% to 17% between 2011 and 2019.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1060586X.2020.1738816 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpsaxx:v:36:y:2020:i:4:p:297-322

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rpsa20

DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2020.1738816

Access Statistics for this article

Post-Soviet Affairs is currently edited by Timothy Frye

More articles in Post-Soviet Affairs from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().