The Demographic Cost of World War One for Europe

Tyne Cot British Cemetery, Flanders

By  Massimo Livi-Bacci, University of Florence

Excerpted from DEMOGRAPHIC SHOCKS: THE VIEW FROM HISTORY; Center for Intergenerational Studies, 2001

In Europe proper—west of Russia—the twentieth-century demographic seismic shifts were due to wars, to the related human losses, civilian and military, and to the geopolitical revolution of the continent through population transfers, refugee movements, and the like. As a result of the modifications of warfare between the First and the Second World Wars—1939-45 warfare was less labor intensive and increasingly technological—the balance between military and civil losses had shifted, the latter having an increased share in the tally. With a relatively young age structure, fertility usually above replacement, and long-term falling mortality (excluding the war years), war losses were soon recovered by the European population. However, between 1913 and 1920 the population declined from 340 million to 337.7 million (-0.7 percent) against an increase from 97.2 million to 106.5 million (+9.3 percent) in the United States (Svennilson 1954, p. 63). The age group 15 to 64, however, increased from 210 million to 216.3 million (+3 percent). Military losses in the five largest belligerent countries—Austria-Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy—were close to 6 million (out of a total of 10 million for all of Europe, including Russia), from a total of 41.5 million mobilized men (one in seven) (Becker 1999, p. 80)

Did the war losses affect economic development? Human capital was depleted (mobilized men underwent a medical selection; the warfare exacted a high number of lives among officers; many of the survivors were sick or disabled). But the issue is complex: One must not forget that Europe was losing population through migration in the years before World War I, an outflow that came to a halt during the conflict, in some measure diminishing the negative impact of war losses. Moreover, during the war many women joined the labor force, replacing men in many activities, in the fields as well as in the factories. Many of these remained in the labor force once the war was finished. In the absence of reliable and comparable data on the labor force, Figure 5 relates the change in the male population of active age (15 to 64) between 1913 and 1920, and the change in GDP per capita over the same period, for fifteen European countries. 

Click on Chart to Enlarge

The figure shows a positive association between the two indicators and does not reject the hypothesis that depletion of human capital went hand in hand with a weak or negative performance of per capita income. However, it is likely that countries that suffered the most in terms of human losses were also those whose physical capital was most damaged by the conflict, and the association above may be in part spurious.

The case of France is interesting. It was the European country most deeply scarred by the warfare on its own territory, a strip 500 kilometers long from the North Sea to the frontier of Switzerland laid waste. Military deaths totaled 1.3 million, or 34 per thousand population, the highest rate in Europe (Becker 1999, p. 80). For a population with the lowest natural increase in Europe, the negative impact was serious. France had favored immigration during the war, particularly in the agricultural sector where the scarcity of manpower was mainly felt. Immigrants came from Spain, Portugal, and Greece, but also from Indochina and North Africa. After the war, the government, faced with the task of reconstruction and the restructuring of the economy, initiated a policy of immigration  particularly from Italy, Poland, and Czechoslovakia). Between 1921 and 1931 the foreign population increased from 1.5 million to 2.9 million, while 0.4 million foreigners were naturalized French. The gross inflow of foreign workers in the 1921-30 period was 1.7 million, mostly in agriculture, mining, and manufacturing (Garden 1988, pp. 106-7, 112).

The case of Britain was different. Human losses were lower than France’s (0.7 million against 1.3 million), and Britain’s demography was much more dynamic. It was quality, more than quantity, that mattered. A common opinion was that the war had been dysgenic because it had stripped the country of the best young people: Those who joined the armed forces enthusiastically and early, and who were in the forefront of the battle, were also more educated and skilled. The myth of a “Lost Generation” was created. J.M. Winter has tested the Lost Generation hypothesis against the available data: Officers had proportionally more killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners of war than other ranks. Members of the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford who joined the Army had a much higher proportion of casualties than average (Winter 1977).

The negative effects of the war on the elites were further compounded by the gender asymmetry created in the marriage market, forcing many women to renounce marriage and forgo reproduction. The higher toll of the elites in the war is supported by French and Italian data: Officers’ mortality was substantially higher than that of men of other ranks.

So one provisional conclusion is that war depleted the human capital in both quantitative and qualitative ways. In terms of per capita welfare, the losses may have had a depressing impact, at least in the short term. In the case of France, where losses had been very serious, immigration provided a solution.