Modeling Past and Future Global Population By Levels of Education

Education is an individual asset acquired mostly at young ages that is significant in determining one’s future. Education is particularly relevant for the study of population as it is highly correlated with the three main population demographic behaviors: fertility, mortality and migration. Moreover, at macro-level, information on levels of educational attainment gives evidence on the stock of human capital available for economic development, itself a major determinant of wellbeing. In this context, and since the existing data collected in censuses and surveys suffer from many flaws – due to lack of consistency in the measurements of education across country and time - developing long time-series on the levels of educational attainment by age and sex is a valid endeavor. IIASA and VID within the Wittgenstein Centre (WIC), have a long tradition of including educational attainment, together with age and sex in population projections using the cohort–component multidimensional projection model. More recently, a simplified multistate projection methodology was also used to back-project the population into the past relying on one single dataset (the base-year) and hence providing information on education that is comparable overtime. My presentation will focus on the methodology and results of the latest round of projections and back-projections. The final dataset includes for 171 countries the reconstructed population by age, sex, and six levels of education expanding from no education to post-secondary education, from 1970 to 2010 and projections to 2100 according to expert argument-based scenarios. The projections presented in this talk require a large amount of information, ranging from base-year data on population disaggregated by levels of educational attainment by age and sex, to data on fertility, mortality, and migration by age, sex, and education for the base year, and, finally, to the assumed numerical values of these determinants according to the different scenarios.