hankyoreh

At around 3pm on Apr. 14, an official at the Ministry of National Defense showed up unexpectedly at its press room carrying a document on the scale of military spending by South and North Korea. The additional details were provided by way of explaining a statement given earlier that morning at the National Assembly by Defense Minister Han Min-koo, who had said North Korea’s yearly expenditures were “believed to be in excess of US$10 billion.”

But the ministry’s figures ended up causing controversy for using completely different standards to assess and compare the North and South‘s military spending.

“If the defense spending announced by North Korea on Apr. 9 is converted into figures, it gives an estimated US$1.15 billion, but that is believed to reflect only ordinary maintenance costs,” the document said.

“When concealed and omitted military spending are factored in, actual spending by North Korea comes out to US$10.2 billion in terms of purchasing power parity [PPP],” it added.

The report went on to estimate South Korea’s defense budget at “approximately US$32.5 billion for 2014.”

“The ratio of actual military spending between South and North is approximately three-to-one,” it concluded.

The ministry’s goal in presenting the data may have been to rebut claims that South Korea was spending 33 to 34 times what North Korea does on its military, and show the gap was not as wide as reported.

But the figures showed signs of having been inflated, with North Korean spending calculated in PPP terms and South Korean spending calculated by market exchange rates in an apparent effort to make the former look larger.

When asked how the ministry estimated the North Korean military’s “concealed” spending, the official said it “took into account North Korea’s increased weapon systems,” but said he could not provide further details. Even if this evasion was a security measure, the use of different standards to misrepresent the reality comes across as an own goal against the military’s own credibility. Previously, a seemingly humbled military had pledged not to conceal or downplay the facts after running into heavy public criticism for cover-ups and whitewashing in last year’s case of a private first class surnamed Yoon who died of injuries suffered during ongoing bullying. The latest reports raise renewed questions over how much reflecting it actually did, or whether the promise was sincere.

Indeed, even the ministry’s own numbers have the spending ratio between South and North growing to around 4.4-to-one. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) World Fact Book estimates North Korea’s gross domestic product (GDP) for 2014 at US$40 billion in PPP terms and US$28 billion in terms of market exchange rates. By the standard of that ratio, the estimated US$10.5 billion in North Korean military spending drops to US$7.35 billion in market rates.

By Park Byong-su, senior staff writer

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]