Highest defence budget (percentage of GDP)

The country with the highest annual defence budget as a proportion of GDP is Oman. According to the most recent figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Oman's military spending amounted to 12.1% of the country's GDP in 2017.

The SIPRI's figures for Oman are flagged as "highly uncertain", but Oman has maintained consistently high levels of military spending (between 14% and 16% of GDP) since 2012. The small but wealthy state is a major arms importer that equips its 44,000-strong armed forces with state-of-the-art western military hardware. The country that spends the next highest proportion of GDP on its military is Saudi Arabia, which spends an estimated 10.3% of GDP on its military (through this too is marked as "uncertain" by the SIPRI). The United States, by comparison, spends 3.1% of its GDP on defence, and China 1.9%.