It seems clear that poverty and lack of development fuel hatred and escalate hostilities, and that improvements in such areas as nutrition, health, education, water, sanitation and family planning would go far to reduce the underlying causes of so many wars. By any reasonable international perspective, this seems a relatively small sum of money. This should have meant a transfer of sizeable sums of money to social, economic and environmental programmes. Instead, it appears that virtually all of these savings have gone to budget deficit reductions and non-development expenditures. This seems an extremely short-sighted policy.
Health expenditures remain much lower.
At the same time, despite the overall global decline, large amounts of scarce resources continue to be devoted to armaments. 46 Sadly enough, some of the steepest increases occurred in the poorest countries. Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Myanmar, Somalia and Yemen have for many years spent more on their military than they have on their people's education and health. Money spent on arms could have been put to much better use. In recent years, however, there has been, as noted, some limited improvement in both developing and industrialized countries.