Military Spending: How Azerbaijan Surpassed Armenia

Three years after the last war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Armenian-majority separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh has suffered new Azeri strikes. Baku says its intention was to target military infrastructure as part of an “anti-terrorist operation” and to spare civilians, but observers on the ground have reported a heavy human toll: At least 32 civilian deaths in the space of 24 hours. This Wednesday, the authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh accepted a ceasefire with Azerbaijan, after mediation by Russian peacekeeping forces. Talks are planned for as early as Thursday to discuss the region's reintegration into Azerbaijan.

Since the 1990s, the enclave has been the center point of conflicts between the two former Soviet republics. During the first Nagorno-Karabakh war (1988-1994), it was Armenia which gained the upper hand militarily over its neighbor and won the conflict, allowing the secessionist region to retain a certain degree of autonomy. Over the past three decades though, the economic and military balance has changed profoundly between the two parties.

As this infographic shows, benefiting from revenues from the oil industry, Azerbaijan saw its GDP grow 45-fold between 1995 and 2022. At the same time, the country's military budget expanded 29-fold. At approximately the same level as its neighbor in the early 1990s, Armenia, on the other hand, has not experienced the same economic and military development. Armenia's GDP has increased 15-fold since 1995, and its military spending 13-fold.