The Rise and Fall of Armies

Jonathan Adams

No 1002, Working Papers from University of Florida, Department of Economics

Abstract: For a thousand years, income growth was associated with a rising military employment share. But this share peaked in the early 20th century, after which military employment shares fell with income growth. I argue that rising military shares were driven by structural change out of agriculture, and the recent declines are driven by substitution from soldiers towards military goods. I document evidence for this substitution effect: as countries' incomes rise, the ratio of their military expenditure share to their military employment share rises too. I introduce a game theoretic model of growth and warfare that reproduces the time series patterns of military expenditure and employment. The model also correctly predicts the cross-sectional pattern, that military employment and expenditure shares are decreasing in income during wars. Finally, I show that faster economic growth can reduce military expenditure in the long run.

JEL-codes: E10 F51 H56 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z7f4vd94ssiluijha9q ... c1rw2jpu1yrjorj&dl=1 First version, 19-05-2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The rise and fall of armies (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ufl:wpaper:001002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Florida, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jonathan Adams ().