Education will be at the heart of 21st century demography

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Improving Education as Key to Enhancing Adaptive Capacity in Developing Countries

This paper summarizes new scientific evidence supporting the hypothesis that among the many factors contributing to international development, the combination of education and health stands out as a root cause on which other dimensions of development depend. Much of this recent analysis is based on new reconstructions and projections of populations by age, sex and four levels of educational attainment for more than 120 countries using the demographic method of multi-state population dynamics. It also refers to a series of systems analytical population–development–environment case studies that comprehensively assess the role of population and education factors relative to other factors in the struggle for sustainable development. The paper also claims that most concerns about the consequences of population trends are in fact concerns about human capital, and that only by adding the ‘quality’ dimension of education to the traditionally narrow focus on size and age structure can some of the long-standing population controversies be resolved.Human Capital, Education, Health, Root cause of development, ‘Quality’ dimension in population analysis

What should be the goal of population policies? Focus on 'Balanced Human Capital Development'

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Adaptation versus mitigation policies on demographic change in Europe

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World population in 2050: assessing the projections: discussion

I would like to follow up on the last sentence of the excellent presentation by Joel Cohen. It is indeed true that the lag between new methodological developments and their actual implementation by statistical agencies is regrettably long, but I think there is some hope that the speed of applying innovations has been accelerating over this century. This is the case in many other areas, and it would be surprising if it were not the case in the field of population forecasting. I would assess with a probability of well above 90 percent that by the end of this century, institutional procedures for projecting population will include probabilistic elements. ; In the following, I would like to mention three additional aspects [new methods, extreme events, and projections of population by level of education] complementing the important remarks made by Cohen.Demography ; Economic conditions

Can Immigration Compensate for Europe's Low Fertility?

This paper addresses in a systematic demographic manner the widely discussed question: To what extent can immigration compensate for low fertility in Europe? We begin with a set of 28 alternative scenarios combining seven different fertility levels with four different migration assumptions at the level of the EU-15 to 2050. Next, we address the research question in the context of probabilistic population projections, and the new concept of conditional uncertainty distributions in population forecasting is introduced. Statistically this is done by sorting one thousand simulations into low, medium, and high groups for fertility and migration according to the average levels of paths over the simulation period. The results show a similar picture to that of the probability-free scenarios, but also indicate that for the old-age dependency ratio, the uncertainty about future mortality trends greatly adds to the ranges of the conditional uncertainty distributions.

Will Population Ageing Necessarily Lead to an Increase in the Number of Persons with Disabilities?

There is a widespread expectation that the combination of significant population ageing in Europe over the coming decades, along with the fact that the elderly are more likely to have disabilities, will result in a large increase in the total prevalence of disability and the need for significantly expanded care facilities for the elderly. Recent evidence from the U.S., however, suggests that disability rates of the elderly are declining and that further declines could be expected in the future. In this paper we present alternative demographic scenarios for the European Union (EU-15) that distinguish between people with and without disabilities by age and sex. The results show that under the assumption of a constant age-specific disability profile, we indeed expect a significant increase in the total number of people with disabilities due to population ageing. However, if the age profile of disability is shifted to the right (i.e., to higher ages) by one, two, or three years per decade, the scenarios show a much lower or no increase in the number of persons with disabilities in Europe over the coming decades.

Education or wealth: which matters more for reducing child mortality in developing countries?

This article systematically addresses mother’s education as a fundamental determinant of child mortality in developing countries. The main proposition is that setting the right policy priorities in developing countries requires distinguishing between the role of education and that of material resources in influencing child survival. Despite a tendency to regard both education and economic resources as interchangeable indicators of socioeconomic status, determining their relative importance with respect to child health is important because policies for enhancing one or the other can be quite different. We begin with a comprehensive review of the literature addressing the different causal mechanisms through which maternal education impacts on the health of her offspring. We include better maternal health, increased health-specific knowledge, adoption of non-traditional behaviours, and general female empowerment in addition to the effects of greater economic resources gained as a consequence of education. We use recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for developing countries and examine the associations between survival of the youngest child over the first year of life, the mother’s educational attainment and the DHS indicator of household wealth both descriptively and using multivariate models. The results show that in the vast majority of countries and under virtually all models mother’s education matters more for infant survival than household wealth. Our findings challenge frequently held views and suggest a reorientation of global health policies to more directly address increasing female education as a primary policy option for improving child health.