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Abstract: There are two reliable sources for acquiring arms trade data, one is from us government intelligence agencies which regularly release the up-to-date data through official research reports; another is from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which periodically updates its online arms trade database or publishes SIPRI yearbook each year. We deliberate on the two main resources for arms trade data and find there exist many differences which respectively are, main information sources, definition coverage, pricing method, and contents published. Through contrastive analysis toward different sources, we summarize their merits and demerits respectively and conclude that answering different questions about the arms transfer needs to choose pertinent types of data.
Keywords: Arms trade; Data sources; Comparative analysis
1. INTRODUCTION
Arms trade is one of the most intensely discussed issues in the public at large, as well as in the social sciences. Scholars have looked at various aspects of arms transfers and drawn conclusions from existing data, but seldom have the questions of validity and accuracy of the data.
It is common knowledge that data on arms transfers are especially unreliable and open to manipulation.
Still, one finds scores of empirical studies and policy papers based on the existing data.
In this paper, we first make a list of all sources for data of arms trade, and find out the most reliable and authoritative ones.
Next, we compare data from different sources and sum up their respective merits and demerits. Based on the analysis, we draw this paper's conclusion.
There are basically four institutions that put out arms trade data of some kind, which is as following: One comes from researching reports provided by US official institutions.
The most common cited reports fall into two categories.
One kind of report is prepared annually to provide Congress by Congressional Research Service, (CRS) whose name is 'Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Countries'(CATDN);
Another kind of report is annually published previously but now irregularly issued by the Bureau of Verification and Compliance,(BVC), whose name is 'Word Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers'(WMEAT).
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute which is a semi-official research institution also a reliable source for arms trade data, SIPRI periodically updates its online arms trade database or publishes SIPRI yearbook each year.
The database and...