A serious and policy-relevant effort in education forecasting requires more than the application of existing multi-state models.
These methods need educational transition rates as input variables, but deriving realistic values for these transition rates is far from trivial.
Some major issues are:
Within IIASA such issues have been addressed in the context of recent PDE (population-development-environment) case studies on Mozambique and Namibia. It has involved using separate demographic models for the population of teachers and students, which distinguish individual year school grades, in addition to the multi-state model of the adult population.
Similarly sophisticated analyses will be needed for applications to other countries.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
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