New Arms Trade Resource Site : "Armsflow"

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press Wednesday February 06, 2008 01:14 by +

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has long been on of the most trustworthy & respected research resources for people who like to count Scud missiles & stuff like that. In addition to "stuff like that", they do pretty good analysis too & not for nothing have they been ranked in the top 30 most influential think-tank entities on the planet. But most people who use this site don't pay attention to think-tanks & probably wouldn't even notice if they were floating like Tom Cruise in a tank having a think about how bad & evil the arms trade is for the good reason they didn't get the right degrees or recruited by the appropriate sort of shadowy agencies in their youth. Thankfully SIPRI has now decided to offer a lot of its information not only for free, but in a format & language. In short - (for I know no other way) I introduce you to the website " Armsflow ".

representing the arms trade

You get a pretty nifty (if a bit slow) java script which graphically presents to you the current flow of Arms & weapons on the planet & also lets you see the volume of trade since 1950 to the latest collated figures of 2005. The average for annual trade is currently 15,000 verified transactions. You can see that the mid-80's were very good for arms trading & then for some reason people went off them towards the late 90's to reach a slump by 2001.

Then it all changed. We were not quite back up to the arms trade volume of 1982 by 2005 at 56 billion Us dollars (or about what Bill Gates thinks Yahoo is worth) but it seems pretty certain that by the time the figures for 2007 or this year 2008 come out - it will be a done thing that at least one person on your housing estate statistically had a shooter or at least a bullet.

the site -
http://www.armsflow.org/

______________________________ the serious stuff for buying & selling arms is a serious biz.

......."SIPRI data on arms transfers refer to actual deliveries of major conventional weapons. Data on arms transfers are presented in the form of SIPRI Trend Indicator Values (TIVs). TIVs are expressed in US$ m. at constant (1990) prices. However, although figures are expressed in US$, TIVs do not represent the financial value of goods transferred. Instead, TIVs are an indication of the volume of arms transferred. Hence, TIVs can be used to measure trends in international arms transfers, such as changes in the total flow of weapons and the geographic pattern of arms exports or imports. The data can also be used to measure a particular country's share of the overall import or export market or the rate of increase or decline in its imports or exports. However, since TIVs do not represent the financial value of the goods transferred, they are not comparable to official economic data such as gross domestic product or export/import figures. In order to calculate the financial value of the arms trade, the Arms Transfers Project collects official government and industry data on the value of countries arms exports."
http://www.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/output_types_TIV....html

........"ccording to the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, the countries that produce official data on their arms exports account for over 90% of the total volume of deliveries of major conventional weapons. By adding together the financial value of their arms exports, it is therefore possible to arrive at a rough estimate of the financial value of the global arms trade. Because certain countries release more than one figure on the value of their arms exports, this estimate can only be a range, including the aggregates of the lowest and the highest reported values. For certain countries and certain years official data are unavailable and estimates have been made on the assumption that the rate of change in an individual country for which data are missing is the same as the average in the sample as a whole. Before calculating the world total, all national figures have been converted to calendar years, assuming equal distribution during the relevant years......"
http://www.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/at_gov_ind_data.html

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........"National reports on arms exports

An increasing number of countries produce annual reports on their arms transfers. This information varies enormously in terms of timeliness, format and level of detail. Some countries produce reports that include detailed descriptions of all equipment licensed for export, instances where an export licence was denied, and all equipment actually exported. Meanwhile, others countries produce only financial data on either licences or exports with little information on the type of equipment involved. In addition to producing national reports, many countries also make information available to regional and international reporting mechanisms such as the the Annual Report according to Operative Provision 8 of the EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports or the UN Register on Conventional Arms Transfers. This page is an attempt to bring together all of these national, regional and international reporting mechanisms in one place..........."

& that page is where as they say you get to read lots of data, but be warned of the 7 main arms suppliers (3 of whom are European) not a single one likes to give full disclosure to how much it actually sells........or even to whom.........

http://www.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/atlinks_gov.html

you might like to know why I included a photo of he I nicknamed 9mm Willy O Dea.
simple here is the report on the Irish arms trade from 1998 to 2003. tardy bunch you might say, nothing to do with him you might moan..,

http://www.sipri.org/contents/armstrad/atlinks_gov.html#IRE

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you might also like to peruse the small arms survey to keep an eye on the 9mm crew.

http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/files/portal/issueareas/....html

& compliment it with this site "the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers (NISAT)"

http://www.nisat.org/