milRex

The goal of milRex is to make it easy to query military expenditure data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. They offer the most up-to date, openly available data on military expenditure.

🚧 Under construction 🚧

• ⚠️ Please verify a few data points of downloaded data with the SIPRI website to make sure that everything works, as this is currently under construction.
• ⚠️ Please cite SIPRI when using the data and read the Sources and Methods section on their website concerning limitations linked below ⬇️.

⚙️ Installation

You can install the development version of milRex from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("datapumpernickel/milRex")

💲🏛️ Usage

This would query all the data, for military expenditure in constant USD.

library(milRex)
data <- sipri_get_data(indicator = "constantUSD", 
                    cache = TRUE,
                    verbose = FALSE,
                    footnotes = FALSE)

The available indicators are:

sheet_name	indicator
Constant (2022) US$	constantUSD
Current US$	currentUSD
Share of GDP	shareOfGDP
Share of Govt. spending	shareGovt
Regional totals	regionalTotals
Local currency financial years	currencyFY
Local currency calendar years	currencyCY
Per capita	perCapita
all of the above	all

📝 Sources and Methods

Military Expenditure is a concept that is difficult to measure adequately in a comparative manner across the globe. The dataset by SIPRI is the best effort that exists today, using only open sources. Nonetheless, there is limitation to their data. I highly encourage anyone who wants to use this dataset, to read their Sources and Methods section here:

https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex/sources-and-methods

🔎 Estimates and uncertain data

Some of the SIPRI estimates reported in their dataset are marked as uncertain or estimations (e.g. all the data for China). These cells are marked in blue or red in the resulting excel-file. Unfortunately, color coding is not machine-readable, hence this information cannot be translated into data.frames in R and is missing. Please be aware of this limitation.

🔒 Copyright

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute limits the copying and redistribution of its data to the following two use-cases:

• the excerption of SIPRI copyrighted material for such purposes as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research in which the use is for non-commercial purposes
• the reproduction of less than 10 per cent of a published data set.

Hence, this package does not contain any SIPRI data itself. It merely automatizes the access through the website, by making the corresponding POST request and cleaning the resulting xlsx file into tidy formats.

🤝 Citation

Please make sure to cite SIPRI when using their data with:

SIPRI Military Expenditure Database 2024, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex

You can get a citation for the package with:

citation('milRex')