Adding Soviet exports during 1980-1992 to the Russian exports chart would change it significantly (India would be off the current scale, Germany would no longer be white, and Iraq would be at least dark orange).

I’d agree Australian military exports to the SWPac may be significant in a regional sense but may not register on a world map based on SIPRI data. But there are qualitative as well as quantitative reasons.

(Assumption: NZ is excluded from this discussion.)

It’s true that the SWPac nations’ requirements are modest in a quantitative sense. They don’t maintain large standing armies; in fact, many have no military forces at all. But a quick look at SIPRI’s terms of reference suggests that most of our exports to the SWPac simply fall outside their dataset. Our SWPac customers don’t use, nor do we export, many ‘major conventional weapons’ as defined by SIPRI.

However, I think the ‘minor’ equipment we do export could influence significantly the effectiveness of our neighbours’ forces. We’ve exported stuff like radios, body armour, and small arms: small beer to SIPRI, but probably enough to tip the balance in a conflict between two SWPac nations, none of whom possess artillery or tanks.

Conversely, the Pacific class patrol boats displace over 100 tons and are therefore ‘[war]ships’ in SIPRI’s eyes. However, they’re mostly used in a coastguard role, rarely armed, and ISTR they weren’t constructed to full naval specs. Admittedly, the PNGDF deployed theirs to the Bougainville AO, but everyone else uses them to rescue lost fishermen. Kiribati has one, and their constitution prohibits them from raising a military. ‘Arms’, then?

This ‘end use’ question is — probably correctly– irrelevant to SIPRI. Vanuatu doesn’t have an army as such, but a paramilitary police unit (the ‘Vanuatu Mobile Force’ or VMF). An arms dealer might argue that sales to the VMF weren’t ‘arms exports’ because the VMF is officially part of the police. But it would make no difference if the VMF started shooting….

So there you go!

You are also right that the colour scales cannot be used to make comparisons from one map to another. I played around with a few colouring schemes and found it tricky to use a common scale across maps. Most countries would end up with very little differentiation because they are swamped by the size of imports and exports of the largest countries. Maybe I need to think about some kind of logarithmic scale…

@Stilgherrian: It is certainly a bit tricky to see what’s going on in the Pacific, so here is the list (total exports from Australia from 1980-2008 in 1990 US dollars):

Papua New Guinea $38m
Fiji $18m
Micronesia $18m
Tonga $18m
Solomon Islands $12m
Kiribati $6m
Marshall Islands $6m
Palau $6m
Samoa $6m
Tuvalu $6m
Vanuatu $6m

Thanks for the pointer to the Mark Thomas book. Looks like it’s worth a read.

Only one question from me at this stage: How would Australia’s arms exports to places like the Pacific islands show up? They’d be very tiny dots on this scale of map, and perhaps invisible? Or is my memory faulty about them even existing?

For an amusing introduction to how the arms trade works (if one that’s biased against its very existence), try Mark Thomas’ As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandala: underground adventures in the arms & torture trade. He explains how you can set yourself up as an arms trader — something he’s done as a class exercise with groups of teenage schoolgirls.

Another concern is the change in scales across the maps, which could easily be taken to suggest comparable volumes across the chosen countries. The UK exports chart looks more active than the Russia exports chart, but volume from the latter was almost four times higher in the period 1992-2008 (the only period with separate data for Russia). And Australia is certainly a minnow among whales here. How about a chart colour-coded with total export volumes to make the relative contributions clear?