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By coincidence, two pieces arrived in our inboxes over the last few weeks dealing with military manpower, one on the North and one on the South. Given the preoccupation with the military balance on the peninsula in the wake of Kim Jong Il's death, the two pieces provide some useful speculation about the conventional force balance.
Over at VOX, Moon Ho Il, Associate Professor at the Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, offers up some estimates of the size of the North Korean military. Like a good economic sleuth, he exploited a statistical anomaly: the discrepancy between the total population reported in the 1993 and 2008 censuses and the sum of the population reported for subnational jurisdictions. Moon discovered that the country’s complex registration system requires that registration be returned to the local public security office when individuals join the military and some other para-military units. He therefore infers that the discrepancy is likely to be dominated by military conscripts. The discrepancy for the two censuses is 691,027 and 702,373. The upper bound for the military is thus about 700,000 people and has been surprisingly constant over the period, implying a decline in the military as a share of the total population.
He finds further evidence in the sex ratios by age in the administrative district data. The data shows a big dip in the 16-26 year range, bottoming out at about .6 at age 20, ie., .6 men for every woman. The most obvious explanation: the men are off in the military.
Over at the East-West Center, Elizabeth Hervey Stephen has an interesting piece on "Policy Concerns of Low Fertility for Military Planning in South Korea." The decline in the South Korean birth rate has been the cause of hand-wringing for some time, particularly with respect to the growth of the active labor force and the implications for the social security system.
Stephen takes the question to military planning, and notes the declining pool of conscripts and volunteers. Readers will recognize the simple economic logic. With a declining labor force, there are a limited number of options: try to increase fertility; go more capital-intensive; get women into the workforce; increase service times; get immigrants to do the job. (Curiously, Stephen does not highlight increasing pay). She argues that going higher-tech and increasing service times are likely to be the most plausible in the South Korean context.
Of course, the first-best solution would be to reduce conflict on the peninsula so that South Koreans would not have to carry the burden of supporting the sixth largest military force in the world. But that depends largely on post-succession developments in Pyongyang.
