Measuring the Effect of Military Conscription on a Country’s Innovation

Abstract

Do countries with military conscription produce more innovation? In this paper, I created a 138- country dataset from the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, determined whether a nation had military conscription in each year from 1980 to 2018, and examined whether these countries were more likely to see higher levels of innovation. My findings show that after controlling for the logarithmic transformations of gross domestic product and population, time fixed effects and country fixed effects, conscription is associated with an increase in research and development expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product by 14.75%, an increase in patent applications filed per 1000 residents by 26.12%, an increase in new business density by 55.92%, an increase in the enterprise birth rate by 3.64%, and an increase in the share of employer startups by 9.70%. Additionally, my regressions show that longer conscription leads to greater benefits to a country’s innovation, and the optimal duration of service that maximizes innovation is 25 months. The implications of this research are significant to the international economics literature, and to the world leaders who will make critical decisions about how to jumpstart their nation’s innovation, and whether to conscript the next generation of their citizens.