2013 Arms Imports into Former Soviet States

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has updated its arms transfer data for 2013.  I haven't worked much with arms transfer data since I completed my dissertation a year ago.  However, I recently accepted a job as an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nazarbayev University (Link) and am looking to begin some projects on arms and security in the area.  As a kind of preliminary step in this endeavor I thought I'd play around with some of the SIPRI data while I'm on spring break at UNLV.

I am also teaching a course on research methods in political science this semester.  I am teaching our political science students to do statistical analysis in R.  I am learning a lot myself and am forcing myself to use it rather than STATA - which is my go-to statistical and graphing package.

My first plot is a simple bar chart showing the value of arms imports (major weapons systems) into former Soviet states during 2013.  One interesting aspect is that there are only six states that received arms during this year.  Azerbaijan is also off the charts compared to the other states on the list.  I am also posting my R code to make this chart as well as a link to the csv file that I used as a data source.  I made the R code look good using "pretty R".

# Examine 2013 SIPR Export Data
#setwd() #uncomment and use this command to set your working directory to the folder
  #where you downloaded the csv file to.
imports_fsu_2013 <- read.csv("imports_fsu_2013.csv")
as.numeric(imports_fsu_2013$Imports) #make the Imports column numeric
 
mean_import <- mean(imports_fsu_2013$Imports) # generate mean value
 
png("fsu_imports.png", height = 8, width=11, units="in", bg="transparent",
    res=600)
 
barplot(imports_fsu_2013$Imports,
        names.arg = imports_fsu_2013$Country,
        main=list("Military Imports into Former Soviet Countries 2013 \n in Millions $US", 
                  cex=1.1),
        ylab="Millions $US",
        xlab=list("Importing Country", font=2),
        col = "sienna4")
 
abline(h=mean_import, lty=3, col="black")
text(4,192, "Mean Value of imports to Former Soviet States in 2013", cex=.75)
mtext("Data from SIPRI TIV Database", side = 1, cex=.75, col="dimgray")
 
dev.off()

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org