The Russian Federation, with its plans to regain influence over former Soviet bloc countries, currently constitutes the main military danger for the EU and NATO. Because the war is so close to the EU’s borders, European allies have every reason to increase army financing instead of fuelling a transatlantic disagreement about burden sharing. This article deals with the question of whether the high strategic threat posed by Russia has increased military spending among European allies and decreased free-riding practices after 2014. To analyse this problem, we applied Spearman’s Rank Correlation test and then made a comparative analysis of 21 countries that are both EU and NATO members. Our results confirmed that European allies did not react in the same way to the Russian threat. We proved that strategic factors played a key role in the majority of Eastern European members of NATO, but not across Western European allies.
The paper has investigated the patterns of defence expenditure in the Baltic countries, such as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia during the period of 2004-2018. Distribution of defence expenditure by main category has been analysed and the main tendencies have been provided. The author has done this by applying total expenditure and decomposition approaches. Firstly, the author has calculated the intensity rate of defence expenditure‘s structural changes in order to assess which country’s defence spending structure has been more dynamic over the period analysed. Secondly, Finger-Kreinin indicator has been used to compare defence expenditure distributions and determine their dissimilarities among the countries under consideration. The author believes that the research highlights key structural trends of defence expenditure and could be helpful for policy makers.
Ensuring the defence of freedom, independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and population belongs to the main tasks of each state. Therefore, countries, in response to the current political, security and economic situation, must earmark, within the framework of their national budgets, a proportion of the available resources to ensure their defence. The aim of the article, based on current trends in the defence budgets of the European Union member states, is point out that not only the global economic and financial crisis and the credit and debt crisis in the euro area have a significant negative impact on the amount of resources, which individual European Union member states earmark to ensure their defence.