ifo Institute: Three more countries soon to meet NATO's two-percent target
Some European NATO countries such as Romania, Latvia and Lithuania will soon spend two percent of their economic output on the military. "The United Kingdom has been meeting the two percent target for years, and France is on the right track with 1.8 percent," said Niklas Potrafke, head of the ifo Centre for Public Finance and Political Economy at the launch of the Munich Security Conference.
"Despite increases in the defence budget in recent years, Germany is far from keeping its promise of a two-percent target," Potrafke adds. "In comparison with other large NATO countries, we are in a poor position.“
A recently published study by the ifo Institute shows that changes of government in particular explain why individual NATO countries make less effort to meet the two-percent target. "New heads of government often seem to have little interest in what their predecessors have promised on the international stage," say ifo researchers Johannes Blum and Niklas Potrafke.
In 2014, the NATO member states committed themselves to spending two percent of their annual economic output on defence spending by 2024.
Publication (in German)
Blum, Johannes and Niklas Potrafke, "Internationale Abkommen und Regierungswechsel: Evidenz zum NATO-Zwei-Prozent-Ziel", ifo Schnelldienst 72 (03), 2019, 18–21
