Opportunity Costing of Military Conscription Manpower in Iran

Every year, a large number of young men in our country, Iran, are obliged to go on public service. These people are mostly between the ages of 18 and 28 and have higher education. Obviously, the withdrawal of such a large number of the labor force from the production for the military has a great cost for our economy. However, for various reasons, there is not much research that can provide us with a quantitative assessment of this cost. This study aims to use the method of Operation Research and more precisely through Dual Matrices in Linear Programming to provide a model to determine ​​the Opportunity Cost of manpower drafted for the public service in Iran. All research data are based on the Iranian statistics of 2015. The statistical population of the study is 400,000 conscripts. The focus of this research is to extract the model on the separation of academic degrees and industrial subdivisions with ISIC classification. In advance, according to the few available statistics, the model was solved. According to the research findings, the opportunity cost for public service of men is equal to 46.70% of the Value-Added of the industry sector in 2015. This number is equivalent to the economic cost that our country will incur if the enlisted population is sent to the public service, or in other words, the same amount of opportunity is lost. Besides, in a number of scenarios, the other possibility of military service human source assessment is also discussed.