In addition, people exposed to the war had lower education levels as adults, took more years to acquire that education, were less likely to marry, and were less satisfied with their lives as older adults. Those respondents who experienced war were 3 percentage points more likely to have diabetes as adults and 5.8 percentage points more likely to have depression. The study found that living in a war-torn country during World War II was consistently associated with having poorer health later in life. Experiences were contrasted between respondents who experienced the war or not, and between regions within countries where fighting was centered and those where there was little military activity. Researchers examined salient war-related facts, exposure to periods of hunger, persecution and loss of property such as a home. The survey provides information from a representative sample of 20,000 people aged 50 and older from 12 countries - Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. Researchers analyzed information collected from the European Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which was conducted in 2008. The new study investigates the long-term effects of the war on health, education, economic attainment and marriage among people who live in continental Western Europe. ![]() Families were separated for long periods of time, and many children lost their fathers and witnessed the horrors of battle. ![]() Many people were forced to give up or abandon their property and periods of hunger became common, even in relatively prosperous Western Europe. Discrimination and persecution were widespread, with the Holocaust as the most horrific example. Six years of ground battles and bombing resulted in widespread destruction of homes and physical capital. Deaths in Europe totaled 39 million people - half of them civilians. World War II was one of the transformative events of the 20th century, causing the death of 3 percent of the world's population. “Studies of this type are important to help society better understand the many long-term consequences of military conflict.” “Given the scale of World War II and the ways it fundamentally changed the world, the existing economic literature about its long-term impact is remarkably thin,” Winter said. The study, conducted by scholars in the United States and Germany, examines how war can influence the lives of survivors decades after the fighting ends. ![]() While much attention has been given to studying the battles of war, less effort is devoted to how a conflict of this magnitude affects civilians decades after a conflict. Other authors of the study are Iris Kesternich, Bettina Siflinger and Joachim K. Smith, one of the study's authors and Distinguished Chair in Labor Markets and Demographic Studies at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. “While an event of the magnitude of World War II affected all social classes across Europe, our evidence suggests that the more-severe effects over the past decades were on the middle class, with the lower class right behind them in terms of the size of the impact,” said James P. ![]() The results will be published in the March edition of the journal Review of Economics and Statistics. The results come from a group of economists who examined detailed information from older people surveyed across 12 European nations about their experiences during the war, as well as their economic status and health later in life. Because so many men died during the conflict, the war also lowered the probability that women would marry and left many children to grow up without fathers - a key factor in lower levels of education among those who lived through the war. A novel examination of the long-lasting consequences that World War II had on continental Europeans finds that living in a war-torn country increased the likelihood of a number of physical and mental problems later in life.Įxperiencing the war was associated with a greater chance of suffering from diabetes, depression and heart disease as older adults, according to the study.
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