Does driver's license training work?
No.
Countries (and subnational divisions within some countries) differ quite a bit in how difficult it is to obtain a driver’s license. The requirements here parallel those seen for various kinds of occupational licensing, taxes, and regulations in general, that is to say, they just proliferate over time and rarely decrease. So since this imposes a cost on anyone wanting to drive and those who rely on paid services by drivers (e.g. taxis), we should ask: well does it even work as intended? Presumably, the goal of having a driver’s license law is to 1) prevent unfit people from driving, where unfit means those who are likely to make accidents or just ignore rules, 2) train people to follow traffic rules to prevent accidents. The first relies on exclusion (including the state explicitly taking away the driving privilege if it was abused) and the second relies on teaching.
It’s difficult to study the causal effects of driver’s licenses because, well, everybody who drives has to get the same one, so there will be no variation within many datasets. Raymond Peck (2011) produced one of the only literature reviews I could find with a focus on causally informative studies. He begins with a little history:
Many years ago most would have accepted as axiomatic the premise that pre-license driver training leads to increased driving skill and fewer crashes. This assumption, in fact, led to the creation of the professional driving school industry in the United States during the 1930s. Driver-training (classroom and on-the-road) ultimately became inculcated into the curriculum of many high schools and by 1960, many U.S. states required teenage drivers to complete a certified classroom and behind the-school program before receiving their original driver’s license. The required training usually consisted of 30 h of classroom education and 6 h of on-the-road instruction (1). During this period, a number of rather extravagant claims were made by the driver training industry, sometimes in concert with insurance companies, claiming that driver training programs produced large reductions in young driver crash rates. Some insurance companies offered discounts to teenage drivers who had completed driver training [2], [3], [4].