Our Communications Officer Maria Gili and our Project Officer Leah Wawro outline obstacles to more transparency and accountability in how countries spend their defence budgets.  

Defence budgets are the primary tool that legislators and civil society can use to hold their governments and armed forces to account and see how their taxes are being spent. Yet the ability to use that tool is rare, since most countries disclose too little defence and security spending information to their public, and many disclose only limited information even to their legislatures. Accountability builds public trust in defence and security establishments, and helps reduce corruption that hurts their effectiveness.

TI’s Defence and Security Programme’s latest report, ‘The Transparency of Defence Budgets’, ranked 93 countries according to their defence budget transparency and accountability. The study found that only 13 of those countries score as having high transparency, 20 as moderate to high, 14 as moderate, 21 as moderate to low, and 25 as low. The scale of the challenge is clear: nearly 65% of countries studied scored moderate or below.

So why do so few countries provide defence budget information to their public, and even their legislative bodies?

Read the full blog 'Five challenges when making budgets more transparent'.

Read the coverage we had in Malaysia for the launch of this report on 19 November.

Download the report 'The Transparency of Defence Budgets'.

Read more on the launch we did for this report in Chile in October.

Check other Blogs we've written.

Read more on Our Work and Focus Areas.