We're going to start by seeing how much each country spends overall when it comes to their military, healthcare, and education.
It’s pretty clear to see that the US leads in all three areas of spending, with China coming in second. It's important to note not just that the US is the leader in spending, but how drastic the difference in spending is between the US and the other countries. The US generally seems to be a much higher spender across the board.
When comparing the spending within each country – basically every country spends the most on their healthcare and the second most on their education – with the exception of China who spends the second most on their military. It was interesting to see how much the US spends on healthcare – even if you add their military and education spending together it would still be almost double that amount.
Now that we have an understanding of how much each country spends overall on their military, healthcare, and education, let's take a look at each country's spending in regards to their total GDP.
With the exception of 2013 where the US jumps into the lead, Russia spends the highest percentage of their GDP on their military. Russia seems to also be the only country who crosses over that 4% mark going as high as 5.5% in 2016.
We’ve already established that the US is a high spender – but this chart really emphasizes our spending on healthcare specifically – there are countries such as China and India that spend 3-4% of their GDP on their healthcare while we are spending no less than 16-17% annually. Even Germany, the country with the highest percent after us, spends around 10% of their GDP on healthcare which is still significantly lower than the US.
When we look at education spending as a percent of GDP, we see similar values to military spending – going up to around 6%. Brazil is the country that spends the highest percent of their GDP on education – and China is on the lower end spending less than 2% of their GDP on education.
Looking at military, healthcare, and education spending in relation to total GDP for each country, we see that yes countries like the US and China have high expenditure in these areas - but when we look at this in relation to their GDP, their GDP is so high that it hardly even makes a dent for them. We also see from this graph that basically every country spends the most of their GDP on healthcare out of the three sectors.
Next we'll take a look at each country's spending in relation to their population - also more simlpy known as the spending per capita.
The US and Australia are the leaders when it comes to their military, healthcare, and education spending per capita. It is interesting to see how countries like China who had very high total spending values have significantly low per capita values - meaning that even even though it seems like they are spending a lot, their population is so large that the expenditure on each individual is actually very little.
Not surprisingly, the countries with higher GDP per capitas tend to also have a higher military, healthcare, and education spending value per capita. Similar to how the highest percentage of overall GDP went towards healthcare, the highest per capita spending value is also for healthcare for most, if not all, of the countries.