Abstract
This paper introduces gender discrimination and population growth into a model of political economy. The government keeps up the military for the sake of political instability in the country. It is shown that if the risk of internal conflicts is high, then the government needs a bigger military and a larger supply of young men for it. The government is then willing to boost population growth by keeping women outside the production (e.g. neglecting their education or restricting their movement). Some empirical evidence on the interdependence of political instability, population growth, and gender discrimination is provided.
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Notes
In our theory, we consider the military per population for simplicity. Naturally, population consists of many groups that are not potential rebels, so that the military per labor force is more relevant in empirics.
Caldwell (1982) claims that the import of western values together with goods and services tends to decrease population growth. Bongaarts and Cotts (1996) also emphasize the role of diffusion of information. An alternative explanation for the role of trade was provided by Haaparanta (2004) who argued that, in some cases, trade forces people in a poor country to specialize on agriculture and move back to the countryside where population grows faster, so that trade opening increases population growth.
We excluded Rwanda, China, and Jordan for 1989 (an outlier in terms of military).
The test results 1,834 for the Lagrange multiplier and 197 for the Hausman test favor FEM over OLS and the random effect model.
The role of female literacy rate is important. To see this, take the marginal effect of FEMLIT in regression 2, the means in Appendix B, and the initial population 2.41 billion. We then see that with a unit increase in FEMLIT, population should be 12.7 million lower in 1999. To produce the same result, the military share should almost be halved. Note also that the coefficient for logGDP, which was positive and highly significant in OLS, becomes completely exhausted by country-specific fixed effects.
The correlation between MILPERS and MILEXP is 0.60, between MILPERS and AUTOC 0.24, and between MILEXP and AUTOC 0.23. The data for autocracy come from the University of Maryland’s State Failure Project (Marshall and Jaggers 2002), and the data for military expenditure come from the World Bank (2004).
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Arne Bigsten, Eric Strobl, B. Quattara, Heikki Kauppi, and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.
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Appendices
Appendix A
Given m=ξn, the first-order conditions (Eqs. 22–24) are equivalent to
In the steady state, variables c, n, k, and \(\mu = c^{{ - \sigma }} \) are kept constant. Noting \({\mathop k\limits^. } = {\mathop \mu \limits^. } = 0\) and the Hamiltonian (Eq. 19), conditions 18 and 20 can then be written as follows:
In the system (Eqs. 28–31) of four equations, variables c, n, k, and μ are endogenous and ψ is exogenous. Differentiating this system totally, we obtain
Because the Hamiltonian \({\user1{\mathcal{H}}}\) was assumed to be concave in (c, m, n, k), then it must be concave in (c, n, k) as well with m=ξn. Noting the constraint (Eq. 31), this implies
Given this and the properties of the production function (Eq. 12), we obtain the Jacobian of the system 32 as follows:
Now, by the comparative statics of the system 32, we obtain
Appendix B
Countries (sample 69): Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Congo (Rep.), Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivore, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Laos, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritius, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
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Lehmijoki, U., Palokangas, T. Political instability, gender discrimination, and population growth in developing countries. J Popul Econ 19, 431–446 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-005-0045-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-005-0045-8