Yemen: Military Expenditure
This article says 25% of Yemen’s budget is military expenditure. I get the salaries paid to the loyalists. But the other 14% on hardware? Where are all these weapons? Yemen is not at war. Are they running the weapons into the blackmarket and keeping those profits too?
DS: Defense salaries remained constant from 1998 to 2003 (12 to 14 percent), while nonsalary defense expenditure increased to a high of 14 percent of total expenditures in 2003.
Total defense spending between 1998 and 2003 kept an almost constant share in total current expenditure (almost a quarter), while the petroleum products subsidy fluctuated during this period but remains in recent years much lower than defense spending.
Somewhere on the blog there’s links to documentaion about running weapons to the Sudan, the Palestinians, and into Saudi Arabia. But I didnt realize they were using public money. So those purchases from North Korea and Russia really add up I see.
Ok sorry, Im back. Did I fail to point out, there aren’t enough SCHOOLS in Yemen? That the illiteracy rate among women is about 75%, that in rural areas most kids dont go to school, that almost half of Yemen kids never attend primary school? YT: the rate of the first grade enrollment (6 year olds) has increased very clearly from (49.8%) of the universal enrollment in 2000 to (56.45%) in 2003.
