Image: Polish troops conducting training in the use of US military equipment, 2013 (Source: Flickr/US Army Europe)
The SIPRI Update for May 2014 is out now—read it online, or subscribe to receive the SIPRI Update in your inbox each month.
In this issue we present an essay by Yudit Kiss on lessons from the post-cold war transformation of East Central Europe’s arms industry. She writes:
The fundamental changes of the post-cold war period were an important lost opportunity. In the early 1990s the high-end of the weapon industry in ECE countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia—had the potential to turn into a major engine of a new, high-tech, knowledge-based economy, and the other, less-developed arms-producing branches could have provided additional human and material resources for this transformation. But in the absence of a consistent state policy, the defence sector collapsed, causing significant economic and social losses.
Read the essay online, download a sample chapter from the new SIPRI monograph by Yudit Kiss.
Browse the full list of SIPRI Essays from 2009 to 2014.