Explaining the worldwide decline in the length of mandatory military service, 1970–2010

Tarabar, Danko; Hall, Joshua C.

doi:10.1007/s11127-016-0349-0

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Simply put, in a developing country, where the informal sector of the economy is large, taxes that might be less distorting are easier to evade and harder to collect. A recent paper by Tarabar and Hall [25], which came to our attention only after we completed our own analysis, overlaps a bit with ours, but also differs from ours. They estimate a single equation with panel data at 5-year intervals, 1970-2010, for about 100 countries, an equation that explains length of conscript service obligation.…”

Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 50%

“…The persistence of conscription in the developing countries, even though the developed countries seem to have one-by-one been abandoning it in favor of all-volunteer systems, has been remarked by many but never yet fully explained. (See however: Hall [11], Economist magazine [7], and Tarabar and Hall [25]). We offer an explanation, based on the cross-country differences in cost of a conscription system compared to an allvolunteer recruitment system, as represented in the model of Mulligan and Shleifer [17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conscription and the developing countries

Vuong

Flath

2018

IJEPS

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Many countries, mostly ones with developing economies, still have conscription. This study explains why, based on the costs of different recruitment systems. A conscription system can be costly to set up, and misallocates labor compared to all-volunteer recruitment, but entails a smaller wage bill. In a developing country with a highly distorting tax system, the burden of taxes needed to finance the higher wage bill of an all-volunteer military can be larger than the burdens that are unique to a conscription system. The highly burdensome taxes that the government of a developing country with a large informal sector must rely upon mean that its variable cost of staffing a government labor force or army by an all-volunteer system is greater than that of a developed country that can levy less distorting taxes. The minimum force size for which conscription has lower cost than voluntary recruitment is higher, the greater the tax distortion. Furthermore, to economize on training cost, a country with a more distorting tax system is more likely to have a lottery, with longer service obligation than if it did not have a lottery. The upshot is that a country with a distorting tax system is more likely to have conscription, and if it does have conscription, is more likely to have a lottery system, with longer service obligation than if it did not have a lottery and drafted an entire age cohort. If our reasoning is correct, countries with less efficient tax systems, wishing to recruit larger fractions of their labor forces, would be more likely to have conscription with longer service obligations. We show that such patterns are indeed present in the data-a cross section of 104 countries observed around 2012. In this way, we explain why many developing countries continue to impose conscription even as the developed countries are abandoning it.

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Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 50%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conscription and the developing countries

Vuong

Flath

2018

IJEPS

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Conscription ended in Britain in 1960, in the United States in 1973, in France in 2001, and in Germany in 2011. Despite of a decline in the use of conscription over the last decades, it is still in use, also in some highly‐developed economies (Tarabar & Hall, 2016). Across the world, however, 94 of the 179 countries for which data are available still practice conscription (Galiani et al, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of mandatory military and alternative community service on wages and other socioeconomic outcomes

Puhani

Sterrenberg

2022

Kyklos

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In this paper, we estimate the effects of mandatory military and alternative community service by exploiting the post‐cold war decrease in the need for soldiers causing a substantial number of potential conscripts not to be drafted into the German military. The study is based on retrospective survey information for 655 men from the 1970 to 1984 birth cohorts collected in 2009/10 and after, using previously unavailable information on degree of fitness in the military's medical exam as a control variable. We test for the effects of mandatory service on wages, employment, volunteer work, marriage/partnership status, and satisfaction with various aspects of life. Whilst many estimates are not statistically significant, for the younger birth cohorts 1976 to 1984, we find some evidence of a lower hourly wage due to mandatory military service, which shows a negative point estimate of −15% with a large confidence interval of between −30 and −0.2%. This interval estimate is consistent with previous findings for the United States, Denmark, and the Netherlands. However, we also find statistically significant estimates for both military and alternative community service to increase participation in volunteer work, a hitherto rarely explored effect.

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“…Conscription ended in Britain in 1960, in the United States in 1973, in France in 2001, and in Germany in 2011. Despite of a decline in the use of conscription over the last decades, it is still in use, also in some highlydeveloped economies (Tarabar and Hall, 2016). Across the world, however, 94 of the 179 countries for which data are available still practice conscription (Galiani, Rossi, and Schargrodsky, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Mandatory Military Service on Wages and Other Socioeconomic Outcomes

Puhani

Sterrenberg

2021

SSRN Journal

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In this paper, we estimate the effects of mandatory military service by exploiting the post-cold war decrease in the need for soldiers causing a substantial number of potential conscripts not to be drafted into the German military. Specifically, using previously unavailable information on degree of fitness in the military's medical exam as a control variable, we test for the effects of mandatory military service on wages; employment; marriage/partnership status; and satisfaction with work, financial situation, health, family life, friends, and life in general. We find almost no statistically significant effects of this 6 to 9 month career interruption for young German men, with the exception of hourly wage, which shows a negative point estimate of -15 percent with a large confidence interval of between -30 and -0.2 percent. This interval estimate is consistent with previous findings for the United States, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

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Explaining the worldwide decline in the length of mandatory military service, 1970–2010

Cited by 13 publications

References 35 publications

Conscription and the developing countries

Conscription and the developing countries

Effects of mandatory military and alternative community service on wages and other socioeconomic outcomes

Effects of Mandatory Military Service on Wages and Other Socioeconomic Outcomes

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