LETTER: Neglecting defence can have unpleasant results
Military spending is always a grudge purchase
I will not correct the misperceptions regarding Armscor and Denel contained in Terry Crawford-Browne’s diatribe (“Armscor was irredeemably corrupt (https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/letters/2020-09-15-letter-armscor-was-irredeemably-corrupt/)”, September 15). Those who developed the systems can do that themselves if they wish to bother with him. But I would like to touch on his statements regarding the World Bank.
The origin of the idea of 2% of GDP as a safe defence spending level seems to have been a paper presented at the 1991 World Bank annual conference on development economics. That paper, by the Independent Group on Financial Flows to Developing Countries, argued that “when decisions concerning allocations of foreign aid are made, special consideration be given to countries spending less than 2% of their GDP in the security sector”. I do not recall it going much beyond that...
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