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.

摘要

本文提出了一种透明的方法来收集，构建和分析俄罗斯有关国防和安全相关支出的预算数据。由于涉及保密和会计原则的问题，不可能准确地回答俄罗斯的国防开支有多大的问题。我们通过为俄罗斯的军事开支设定上下限来规避这一挑战，表明根据所选择的措施，这些开支已从2011年联邦开支的10.3–31.2％增至2018年的12.9–35.4％。该分析还得出对俄罗斯预算中的保密概念有更多的见解；我们发现，俄罗斯预算的96个子章节中有39个包含秘密支出，其中许多在名义上与国防或安全无关，