Education and Military Rivalry

Abstract

Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By contrast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic political institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commodity prices or rivalries in a certain country's immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence. * We thank Xavier Jaravel for superb research assistance. We are also grateful to Tim Besley, Nick Bloom, Jim Fearon, Claudia Goldin, Elhanan Helpman, Kalina Manova, Nathan Nunn, and Francesco Trebbi for help and suggestions, and to seminar participants at Harvard, Brown, Stanford GSB, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program meeting for useful comments. Financial support from the ERC and the Torsten and Ragnar Söcerberg Foundations is gratefully acknowledged.

Nation-Building and Education

“…In the Appendix, Table A2, we show the robustness to the 10 percent threshold. Aghion, Jaravel, Persson, and Rouzet (2015) show that the threat of war is associated with increased primary education enrollment (considered as a measure of nation-building), but that the threat of war may only be relevant when countries are sufficiently democratic. This result would be consistent with our model as well: a dictator can "force" armies to fight by fear, in a more democratic regime it may be more difficult to do so and teaching nationalism may be more compelling and necessary.…”

“…One is about education policies across democratic and non-democratic regimes. Aghion, Jaravel, Persson, and Rouzet (2015), using annual data on 137 countries from 1830 − 2001, find that autocracies have higher enrollment rates in primary education than democracies. Consistent with this finding, Mulligan, Gil, and Sala-i-Martin (2004) examine cross-country data from and find that there is no evidence that democracies spend more on public education than non-democratic regimes.…”

“…In this paper, we focus on internal factors which motivate governments to implement nation-building policies. Aghion, Jaravel, Persson, and Rouzet (2015) and Alesina, Reich, and Riboni (2017) study the importance of external motives for nation-building, namely the threat of external wars. Internal and external motives to nation-build may coexist as we will show below.…”

“…Since our measure of educational reform is based upon enrollment per capita, rather than enrollment per school-age child, we control for population growth to mitigate the concern that our measure is affected by shifts in the demographic structure of the population. Aghion, Jaravel, Persson, and Rouzet (2015) show that mass education is associated with the country being involved in an external war in the previous 10 years. The external war variable is taken from the Correlates of War database.…”

Landownership concentration and the expansion of education

“…He argues that the degree of democratization positively affects primary education, whereas decentralization of political power is more related to differences in higher levels of schooling, such as secondary and higher education. Aghion et al (2012) argue that democratization does not play an important role and suggest instead military rivalry as an important factor behind countries' decision to invest in mass primary education.…”