Your country needs you!: forced recruitment in Honduras

Conscription was an obvious topic for economists to study during the heyday of the Vietnam war but, as the US draft threat has receded, so has the literature. One area where conscription remains important however is in the developing world, in particular, Latin America. Here the military maintain a high profile, yet forced recruitment remains a seriously under‐researched area. Our paper addresses this, assessing whether the armed forces in Honduras have implemented systematic recruitment patterns, through the examination of a rural household survey of 794 families.