Are Economic Upturns Bad for Military Recruitment? A Study on Swedish Regional Data 2011–2015

Peter Bäckström

Defence and Peace Economics, 2019, vol. 30, issue 7, 813-829

Abstract: This paper represents the first effort to explore the relationship between civilian labour market conditions and the supply of labour to the military in the all-volunteer environment that Sweden entered after the abolishment of the peacetime draft in 2010. The paper investigates the effect of civilian unemployment on the rate of applications from individuals aged 18–25 to initiate basic military training, using panel data on Swedish counties for the period 2011–2015. A linear fixed-effects model is estimated to investigate the relationship, while controlling for a range of socio-demographic covariates, unobserved heterogeneity on the regional level, as well as aggregate trends on the national level. The results of the panel-data analysis indicate that the unemployment rate has a positive and statistically significant effect on the application rate. These results are robust to non-linear form specifications, as well as allowing the civilian unemployment rate to be endogenous. As such, the results suggest that the civilian labour market environment in Sweden can give rise to non-trivial fluctuations in the supply of applications to initiate basic military training within the Swedish Armed Forces.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2018.1522572

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