Our conclusion was that some aid does indeed leak into military spending, but surprisingly little—our best estimate is about 11 percent. This is not negligible, but on the basis of this it would be grossly unfair to claim that aid is wasted. Nevertheless, in those bottom-billion societies that get a lot of aid, even 11 percent of it adds up to quite a lot of the military budget. We estimate that something around 40 percent of Africa’s military spending is inadvertently financed by aid.
