Military and Education expenditure, 2012-2016

This cloud of dots compares public spending on education (along the horizontal axis) with expenditure on the military (along the vertical axis), both amounts being expressed as share of GDP. Data are only available for a hundred or so states – which excludes China, Nigeria, and Egypt, for example – and it appears that, overall, spending on education is around double that for the army. Some countries spend more on the military sector than on education (Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Russia, Jordan, etc.) whereas, at the other end of the scale, the Scandinavian countries pay at least five times more for education than for the army.