2001 Education Projections

Background

Education is considered a crucial variable in explaining differences in fertility behavior and differential patterns of mortality and migration. At the same time, education is considered to be the best means of improving the quality of human resources, thereby promoting economic development.

Population projections by level of education are an important step in improving population forecasting and its relevance. Adding education to age and sex as an explicitly considered demographic dimension in population forecasting affects the demographic output parameters themselves due to the fact that a significant source of so far unobserved heterogeneity is being observed and explicitly endogenized. It may, therefore, be considered an improvement of the purely demographic output parameters of the projection. More importantly, however, due to the overriding substantive importance of education, the future educational composition of the population is of interest in its own right as it shapes the human capital component of population.

We present here population projections by level of education for 13 world regions for the period 2000 to 2030. The demographic methodology of multi-state population projections has been applied. This method is based on a multi-dimensional expansion of the life table (increment-decrement tables) and of the cohort-component projection method developed at IIASA during the 1970s.

Last edited: 22 July 2013