Breaking the waves ? does education mediate the relationship between youth bulges and political violence ?

Much of the developing world has experienced a decline in mortality, while fertility often has remained high. This has produced youthful populations in many countries, generally referred to as"youth bulges."Recent empirical research suggests that youth bulges may be associated with increased risks of political violence and conflict. This paper addresses ways that education may serve as a strategy to reduce the risk of political violence, particularly in the context of large cohorts of young males. The authors use a new education dataset measuring educational attainment. The dataset is constructed using demographic back-projection techniques, and offers uninterrupted time-series data for 120 countries. The empirical analysis finds evidence that large, young male population bulges are more likely to increase the risk of conflict in societies where male secondary education is low. The effect on conflict risk by low education and large youth populations is particularly strong in low and middle-income countries. This is especially challenging for Sub-Saharan Africa, the region facing the youngest age structure and the lowest educational attainment levels. Although quantitative studies generally find a strong relationship between indicators of development and conflict risk, the results suggest that poor countries do have some leverage over reducing conflict potential through increased educational opportunities for young people. There is further evidence that the interaction of large youth cohorts and low education levels may be mediated by structural economic factors. The study supports broad policy interventions in education by relaxing concerns about the consequences of rapid educational expansion.Population Policies,Access&Equity in Basic Education,Adolescent Health,Primary Education,Youth and Governance

"Sorry I forgot your birthday!": Adjusting apparent school participation for survey timing when age is measured in whole years

When only whole years of age are recorded in survey data, children who experienced a birthday since the beginning of the school year may appear to be of school-age when they are not, or vice-versa. This creates an error in estimates of school participation indicators based on such data. This issue is well-known in education statistics, and several procedures attempting to correct for this error have been proposed. The present study critiques current practice and demonstrates that its limitations continue to confound educational research and high-stakes policy conclusions: speculative explanations have been proposed for what is actually a measurement artefact. An alternative adjustment strategy is proposed that coherently exploits all available information and explicitly indicates the remaining uncertainty. The application of the method is illustrated by a number of empirical case studies using recent household survey data. These examples demonstrate that the method is feasible, accurate, and that taking survey timing into account can significantly alter how these data are interpreted

Time is money: Could deferred graduate retirement finance higher education?

Higher education is never free — the question is: who should pay for it? Current policy debates in Europe are increasingly focusing on raising the share of private funding. To date, policy discussions have centred on a relatively small number of alternatives, namely full public funding, tuition fees, either up-front or delayed and income-contingent, or a surtax on graduate incomes. Here, I present an alternative that, to my knowledge, has not been suggested previously, but sidesteps some important objections against other forms of private contributions. The basic idea explored here is to increase the statutory retirement age for higher education graduates relative to non-graduates. In principle, the resulting decrease in future public pension liabilities can be converted into increased funds for present spending on higher education. In this first discussion of the above proposal I consider important caveats, perform an order-of-magnitude estimate of financial feasibility, i.e. whether deferred graduate retirement (DGR) could potentially raise sufficient funds to replace tuition fees, and discuss advantages and disadvantages compared to more established policy options. I conclude that, at least in the European context, DGR is potentially feasible both financially and politically, has a number of desirable properties compared to the alternatives, and deserves more serious investigation.Higher education, cost-sharing, retirement age.

Modelling the constraints on consanguineous marriage when fertility declines

BACKGROUND Consanguinity - or marriage between close blood relatives, in particular first cousins - is widely practised and even socially encouraged in many countries. However, in the face of fertility transition where the number of cousins eligible to marry declines, how might such constraints on consanguinity develop in the future? OBJECTIVE Numerous studies have stated that the practice cannot continue at present levels and in its present form in the face of fertility transition. However, the future impact of fertility transition on availability of cousins to marry has not yet been quantified. METHODS We perform a simulation exercise using past and projected net reproduction rates (NRRs) derived from the UN. We calculate the average number of cousins of the opposite sex as a function of the average number of children, the average probability of an individual having at least one eligible paternal cousin of the opposite sex, and conclude with an examination of constraints on consanguineous marriage in selected countries under different fertility assumptions. RESULTS Current and projected fertility levels in Middle Eastern countries will create challenging constraints on the custom once today's birth cohorts reach marriageable age. CONCLUSIONS Either consanguinity prevalence will diminish significantly, or the institution will be forced to adapt by becoming more coercive in the face of reduced choice or at the expense of other social preferences (such as for an older groom wedding a younger bride). Fertility decline affects prospects for social change not only through its well-known consequences for mothers but also through shaping marriage conditions for the next generation

The Impact of the Economic Crisis on Labour and Education in Europe

In summer 2007, the US subprime crisis emerged and economic growth in industrialised countries started to slow down. The situation deteriorated after the default of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and despite massive government interventions, the United States and most European countries slid into recession. We investigate the influence of the recent economic and financial crisis on European labour market perspectives and educational attainment decisions. Furthermore we disentangle the differential impacts of the crisis on various demographic subgroups. We find that young male workers have been hit hardest, while older workers and women have been partially protected by non-redeemable contracts and the fact that they work in sectors which have been less severely hit by the crisis. Focusing on the education sector, it seems that the demand for education increases because individuals try to circumvent the tight labour market, while the supply of education suffers because of the increased pressures on federal budgets in most European countries. However, we conclude that it is too early to make a definite statement because the full impact of the crisis on the education sector is still to come.Economic crisis, labour market, education

Drop-out mayors and graduate farmers: Educational fertility differentials by occupational status and industry in six European countries

Background: Understanding the relationship of education to fertility requires the disentangling of the potentially confounding effect of social status, which is highly correlated with education. Objective: We contribute to this aim by examining educational fertility differentials within occupational groups and industries across a broad swath of Central and Eastern Europe, specifically Austria, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, and Switzerland. Methods: Cross-sectional individual-level census samples from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) are sufficiently large to contain sizeable numbers of unusual combinations, e.g., university graduates in low-status jobs or primary school dropouts in professional categories. Completed cohort fertility, as well as the share childless and with high parity, are regressed on effects for educational attainment, occupation, industry, and all their interactions within a Bayesian framework, and the contributions to the outcome variation are analysed. Results: Education has a strong, consistent association with fertility outcomes when industry and occupation are held constant. Furthermore, fertility by industry and occupation yields fairly disparate patterns. We also find that differences in completed fertility across countries can be attributed to country-specific compositional differences in education, industry, and occupation, and to interaction effects. However, differences by country in the baseline rate of childlessness and high parity cannot be attributed to such compositional effects. Conclusions: The educational fertility gradient in the settings studied cannot be attributed to an occupational composition effect. (authors' abstract

Education & the Sustainable Development Goals

Background paper prepared for the 2016 Global Education Monitoring ReportThe review conducted here is not a “systematic review” in the technical sense, with a fixed set of search and selection criteria applied to a defined set of potential sources. One of the aims was of this review was to capture insights from across a large range of disciplines, many of which use their own language and terminology for phenomena that are educational in fact but not in name. In addition, in the area of educational development itself, “grey” literature is common, which ordinarily would not be included in a scientific review. Accordingly, we proceeded through a combination of “snowball” sampling, starting from key studies or review articles, purposive searching to close specific gaps (or to verify the absence of evidence), and by consulting our extensive professional networks. This approach allowed us to identify a diverse range of important items, which would have been missed had we taken a more systematic, scientific approach. An important limitation is that a review of the present scope and ambition can never be fully comprehensive, and that the selection and choices made inevitably partly reflect our own particular areas of expertise and interest, as well as a certain amount of chance. In addition, the timing of the work relative to the SDG process means that only the draft targets were available when we began our review, and also that keeping up to date with other related efforts has been a “moving target”. Around the formal adoption of the SDGs, relevant documents, reports, and data were published almost on a daily basis. At the same time, one strength of our approach has been precisely to be able to take advantage of our networks and social media to learn of such publications almost immediately

Operating Room Management System: Patient Programming.

The Operating Theater (OT) is one of the most critical and expensive hospital resources since a high percentage of hospitalizations are due to surgery. The main objectives are to perform the operation at the right time without incurring excessive waiting times and to optimize the use of medical resources in order to achieve maximum profitability. Management problems in the (OT) have been identified with well-known problems in the field of manufacturing or transport. This prompted us to look for a model used in industrial applications that would allow us to solve the problems of (OT) process as a whole. We first present the hybrid architectural concepts and the development of the control system for the management of the operating room process in its entirety. We then describe the patient programming function and the associated module algorithm based on distributed artificial intelligence