Sep 25, 2015 | Sustainable Development
By Wolfgang Lutz, IIASA World Population Program Director and Founding Director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (Originally published on the World Economic Forum Agenda Blog.)
Wolfgang Lutz
Few people would dispute the importance of education in our lives and those of our children. For good reasons, in virtually all industrialized countries, education is compulsory for everybody for at least 10 years.
In developing countries, however, 780 million women and men remain illiterate. Moreover, about 60 million children of school age are not at school.
Yet instead of making a concerted global effort to bring all children to school, less than 4% of official development assistance funds basic education. Over the past seven years, UNESCO and UNICEF report a decline in basic education.
Many think education is an aspect of social development that comes as a by-product of economic growth. This is wrong. Education is an absolutely necessary precondition of economic development.
Bill Clinton’s famous mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid!”, may be a useful slogan for an election campaign, but it is misleading in setting the priorities for sustainable development. It’s not primarily the economy, nor money, that makes the world go round and determines progress in human well-being. Much more important than the content of people’s wallets is the content in their heads. And what is in our heads is formed and enhanced by education which, in turn, helps fill the wallets, improves health, improves society and the quality of institutions, strengthens resilience at all levels and even makes people happier.
I could discuss the ample scientific statistical analysis to prove the transformative role of education in development. But more convincing may be historical success stories.
Finland was one of the poorest corners of Europe in the late 19th century. In 1868-1869 it suffered the last great famine in Europe not induced by political events. Almost half of the children died in this hopelessly underdeveloped and poorly educated economy based on subsistence agriculture.
After that tragedy, the Lutheran Church, supported by the government, launched a radical education campaign: young people could marry only after they passed a literacy test. The number of elementary school teachers increased by a factor of 10 over just three decades and by the beginning of the 20th century all young men and women in Finland had basic education. In 1906 Finland was the first country in Europe to grant women the right to vote and the subsequent economic development, based primarily on human capital, made Finland one of the world’s leaders in technology, innovation and, as a result, competitiveness.
In the early 1960s, Mauritius was a textbook case of a country stuck in the vicious circle of high-population growth, poverty and environmental destruction. Following the advice of scientists such as James Meade, the government launched a (strictly voluntary) family planning programme together with a huge push on female education. This led to rapid fertility decline plus economic growth, first through the textile industry based on semi-skilled female workers, then in upmarket tourism and more recently in banking and high-tech information technology. Mauritius is the only such success story in sub-Saharan Africa. The country managed to escape the vicious circle of poverty and underdevelopment through investment in human capital.
University students in Malaysia. © Nafise Motlaq / World Bank
Japan, Singapore, South Korea and finally China have similar stories but the timing is different. The Chinese experience shows that such success is not confined to remote and tiny island or city states. The highly elitist appreciation of education in Confucian tradition became transformative for the country once it was combined with the (originally) protestant approach of a broad-based education. Again, these countries built their stunning success stories primarily on improvements in human capital and without significant raw materials or international assistance. Economic growth followed the education expansion.
There is little doubt about the cause and effect between education and human well-being. Neurological research shows that every learning experience builds new synapses making our brains physiologically different for the rest of our lives. Education expands the personal planning horizon and leads to more rational decisions and less fatalism. It clearly empowers people to access more information, contextualize it and make conclusions that are more conducive to personal and societal well-being.
Well educated people are better at adopting good habits such as physical exercise, safe sex or quitting smoking. Education has many other effects on health from lowering child mortality to postponing disability and cognitive decline in old age, besides the commonly cited effects on income and employment. There is even the surprising finding that education makes people happier despite the fact of making them more aware of potential problems. Unsurprisingly, universal education reduces vulnerability to natural disasters and helps people adapt to climate change.
About a decade ago, I discussed some of this evidence with the Nobel laureate Gary Becker. He said: “Well, when I think about it, I cannot think of anything for which I rather would be less educated than more educated.”
Now we need to educate the economists and policy-makers to make it a much higher priority in the development agenda.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
May 11, 2015 | Demography
IIASA demographer Erich Striessnig talks about new research linking population change with climate change scenarios.
What does your research say about population and climate?
In our recent review article published in the journal Population Studies, we give a summary of much of the work that has been carried out over the past few years both at IIASA and at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW; WU) on the contribution of changes in population size and structures to greenhouse gas emissions, as well as societies’ capacity to adapt to climate change. Similar to Mia Landauer in last week’s blog entry, we emphasize the importance of addressing challenges to mitigation and adaptation jointly.
What’s new or unexpected in this study?
The main novelty behind our approach is the explicit inclusion of the full population detail by age, sex, and educational attainment in assessments of societies’ future adaptive and mitigation potential. This is exemplified in the context of IPCC-related climate change modelling which until recently has included only very limited information on the future of population. The new Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which were developed with a huge contribution by IIASA, are an important step to overcoming this situation and to make models of both future greenhouse gas emissions, as well as vulnerability and adaptive capacity with respect to climate change far more realistic.
Population characteristics – not just numbers – make a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions as well as people’s ability to adapt to a changing climate. ©Chris Ford via Flickr
Why is it important to consider the composition of population in regards to future climate change issues?
When thinking about the challenges of the future, it is important also to think about the capabilities that future societies will have to face them. I don’t mean that we should simply lean back and wait for science-fictional future technologies to solve all the problems of humanity, but a look at the changing future composition of populations around the world gives reason for optimism that future societies will be better at preparing, coping, and dealing with the consequences of yet unavoidable climate change than we are today.
What are the links between education and climate change?
Particularly in the developing world, education leads to reduced poverty. But economic growth and the resulting greater affluence, and consumption, also increases global CO2 emissions. So on a first look, education appears to worsen climate change. This has made some environmental activists skeptical about the value of education in the context of mitigation. But to avoid playing poverty eradication and well-being against climate change mitigation, it is necessary to look at behavioral differences at given levels of income. In fact, better education has been shown to be related to more eco-friendly consumption behavior, especially when it comes to home energy use and transportation, two of the main drivers of climate change. In addition to that, education has also been a major driver of technological advancements in the transition to cleaner energy sources.
Research shows that people’s education levels also play a role in how adaptable they are to potential climate-related impacts such as storms and floods. ©Aldrich Lim via Flickr
How do the new SSPs bring demography into the study of climate change?
Population growth is undoubtedly one of the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions and thus climate change. What’s far less acknowledged is the importance of differential climate impact depending on demographic characteristics. Groundbreaking work by researchers from IIASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) featured in the article has shown that people have different footprints when they are young than when they are old and that household consumption differs between rural and urban dwellers. Providing different scenarios for the future composition of populations by age, sex, and educational attainment, the new SSPs for the first time allow researchers from different fields to study the dynamics between population and climate change within a common reference frame.
References
Lutz W, Striessnig E (2015) Demographic aspects of climate change mitigation and adaptation. Population Studies: A Journal of Demography, 69(S1):S69-S76 (April 2015). doi: 10.1080/00324728.2014.969929
O’Neill, Brian C., Michael Dalton, Regina Fuchs, Leiwen Jiang, Shonali Pachauri, and Katarina Zigova. “Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (October 2010): 17521–26. doi:10.1073/pnas.1004581107.
Note: This article gives the views of the interviewee, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Apr 16, 2015 | Demography
By Anne Goujon, Research Scholar, IIASA World Population Program
Today, Catholics are one of the fastest-growing religious affiliations in North America, because of migration and higher fertility levels—for example, the fertility of Catholic women in the USA is 12% higher than that of the Protestants. Could Catholics become the largest religious group in North America?
Catholics are one of the fastest-growing religious affiliations in North America. © Adeliepenguin | Dreamstime.com – Farmers Market, Little Italy, San Diego Photo
In a new book chapter that I wrote with Éric Caron Malenfant and Vegard Skirbekk, we projected the future religious landscape of the USA and Canada, based on a range of scenarios with different combinations of hypotheses regarding future changes of fertility, conversion and secularization rates, and migration.
Based on our projections, the answer is no, North America would not be relative majority Catholic by the middle of the century. But by 2062, it would be a near-tie for the largest religious group in the country: our projections of the religious composition of Canada and the U.S. reveal that for most scenarios, Catholics would make up to 32% of the population, compared to 34% for Protestants.
What drives changes in religious affiliation in a population? Our projections show that the key forces are migration and religious mobility, rather than fertility levels. In fact, most of the change in the relative share of the Catholics and Protestants in North America would be due to the decline in the share of the Protestant population – especially in the USA – rather than by the increase of the share of the Catholic population, which remains quite stable. Our range of scenarios stresses that the religious switch is driven by demographic factors such as migration and the policies that affect these factors. For example, if migration to the USA from Mexico were to decrease, there would be a lower share of Catholics in North America by 2060.
In 2062, our projections show that religious diversity will increase, with growing shares of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, and other religions. This religious diversification would be more pronounced in Canada than in the U.S. In Canada, our projections show the share of other religions would triple according to most scenarios until the 2060s, from around 10% to around 30%, while the same share would increase from 6% to 15% in the U.S. in almost all scenarios. Unless there is a rapid shift in conversion, migration, or fertility levels, our projections show a growth in minority religions, driven mostly by continued immigration, a younger age structure, higher fertility, and low losses through secularization and conversion to other religions.
Sikh people gather at a parade in New York. The projections show shares of other religions in North America, including Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism, increasing by 2060. Photo credit: Michela Simoncini via Flickr
What about people who leave the religion of their family, moving from a religious affiliation to no affiliation? In both countries, more than one in five adults today has a different religion than he/she had in childhood or that of his/her parents. However, in all our scenarios, the population with no religion stays more or less constant up to 2062 at around 17%. This is explained by low shares of non-affiliated persons among immigrants to the U.S. as well as low childbearing levels among non-affiliated people in both Canada and the USA.
Why do changes in the religious landscape matter? Changes in a country’s religious heterogeneity that follow demographic change may affect nations’ culture, value orientations, and policies. The religious composition of a society may also have demographic effects, including behavior and family formation decisions. North America has already witnessed significant changes to its religious make-up in recent years.
Reference
Anne Goujon, Éric Caron Malenfant, Vegard Skirbekk. 2015. “Towards a Catholic North America?” The Changing World Religion Map, pp 1689-1709. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-017-9376-6_89#
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Nov 5, 2014 | Demography
By Samir K.C., IIASA World Population Program
How old are you? This is the most basic demographic question about an individual, and an easy one to answer. What is the population of the world or your country? Well, many who read the news roughly know the number, about seven billion for the world and more than a billion in China and India. But when asked more detailed questions about demography, “What percentage of people are younger than you in the world or your country?” or “What’s the remaining life expectancy for you in your country and the world?” the eyes start rolling. Such questions are important because they lead to better knowledge and awareness about the population, especially the question of life expectancy.
(Photo: UN Photo/Sebastiao Barbosa)
This is why I, with my colleagues Wolfgang Fengler (World Bank), Benedikt Gross (data visualization designer), and many others, have developed a website where people can find out their respective place in the world population or the country population: population.io. The website was launched last Saturday at the TEDxVienna.
How long will we live? Most of us in the general public do not know the answer. But demographers and actuaries can actually project the expected date of death for populations, based on factors such as place of residence, age, and sex. Demographers use data on deaths occurring during a period and the population structure to estimate death rates. These death rates are then included in the life table calculations that show, among other details, expected number of years of remaining life given one’s place of residence, age, and sex.
On population.io, you can find your own expected death date, based on population projections and details such as where you were born, where you live, and your sex. Of course, this date is just an average with a distribution. If the remaining life expectancy for a 40-year-old is 30 more years, that does not mean that all today’s 40-year-olds will die in 2044: roughly half will die earlier and half later. But we hope that exploring this tool will give people some insight into the world and their country’s population and their place within it.
How do we know how long you will live?
To answer this question, we use population projections. To make good population projections, demographers need information about the demographic structure, including current age and sex structure and assumptions about the future scenarios of mortality, fertility, and migration. A “cohort component” method is then applied to calculate the future population size and structure and to obtain number of births, deaths, and migration. This method projects each cohort born in the same one- or five-year period forward in time, to replace the older cohort occupying the age. In the process some die or migrate out (population decreases) and some migrate in (population increases), while women in reproductive age groups might give birth to children, who will then enter the population as a new cohort. All of these numbers and assumptions are needed for many purposes within and outside the discipline of population studies including for a proper answer to our question, “How long will I live?”
Here’s how the calculations behind population.io work. As an example, I’ll take myself: For a male of my age, 40 years old, on average according to the current global mortality rates, my remaining life expectancy would be about 37 years. This is bit scary for me – that means as an average “global citizen, I would die at age 77. In Nepal, where I am from, my life expectancy would be a little more than one year less. However, since I will most likely live in Austria, my remaining life expectancy increases to 43 years, an increase of 7.4 years due to migration.
On population.io, you can explore–among lots of other population data–how living in a different country would affect your life expectancy. Click to try it yourself!
Now, if I add that I belong to the highest category in terms of education, what will happen to my life expectancy? Though education is not yet included in the population.io, it turns out that that also depends to a large degree on where I live. In Portugal or Italy, a person with a university degree would have lesser advantage compared to those with lower secondary education or below (2.5 and 2.6 years more respectively) than someone living in Estonia (13.8 years more) or the Czech Republic (12.5 years), Hungary and Bulgaria (12.1 years).
What if I am a smoker? Do not exercise? These factors too play an important role in future life expectancy, and we plan to add them soon to the population.io Web site.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Sep 23, 2014 | Demography
By: Wolfgang Lutz, Bill Butz, Samir KC, Warren Sanderson, and Sergei Scherbov: IIASA World Population Program
Demographers from the United Nations Population Division and several universities published a paper in Science last week that argues the world population is unlikely to stop growing this century. They calculate that there is an 80% probability that world population, now 7.2 billion, will increase to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion in 2100, with the median at 10.9 billion.
Different projections for future fertility rates in countries such as China and Nigeria are one major reason for the difference in projections between IIASA and the UN. Photo Credit: Evgeni Zotov via Flickr
Next month, we will announce the results of our newest assessment at the launch of a new book entitled: “World Population and Global Human Capital in the 21st Century” (Lutz, Butz and KC, Oxford University Press 2014). Contrary to the UN projections, the IIASA medium (most likely) scenario indicates that world population will increase to 9.2 billion by 2050, peak at 9.4 billion around 2070 and start a slow decline to 9.0 billion by the end of the century.
The new UN paper uses a probabilistic approach to global population projections providing quantitative uncertainty ranges. Such an approach was first developed at IIASA. In a 1997 Nature article, IIASA used probabilistic methods to indicate that the doubling of world population was unlikely. And in a 2001 Nature article, IIASA demographers projected that there was an 85% chance that the world’s population would stop growing this century.
The UN and IIASA population projections use very different approaches for defining the assumptions underlying future fertility and mortality trajectories. The new IIASA projections are based on the substantive input of more than 550 experts worldwide who were invited to evaluate in a peer review manner a set of alternative scientific arguments bearing directly on the future demographic trajectories. This was done through an online survey as well as a series of meetings on five continents. The resulting state of our knowledge and substantive reasoning is documented in over 500 pages in the OUP book.
Alternatively, the UN population projections have recently moved away from their earlier expert-based assumptions to the other extreme: Their new probabilistic population projections reflect expert judgment only in the design of a specific statistical model which then is applied to national time series of 60 years (1950-2010) to extrapolate 90 years (2010-2100) into the future. There is no room for country-specific expert knowledge or for substantive considerations.
IIASA population projections explicitly include education, which is one factor that leads to lower fertility rates and lower projections by IIASA compared to the UN. Source: Wittgenstein Centre Data Explorer
There are two other factors explaining the difference: One is that IIASA now systematically adds a differentiation by level of education in addition to the conventional age and sex to its population projections, as education significantly influences fertility rates (Policy Brief: Rethinking population policies). Once this important source of population heterogeneity is explicitly taken into account the future looks different. In the example of Nigeria, the UN projects an increase from 160 million in 2010 to 914 million in 2100 while IIASA projects only 576 million. The IIASA projections do consider the fact that recently Nigeria has made significant progress in girls education, such that today half of the women aged 20-24 already have secondary education, while among women aged 40-44 the percentage is only 25 percent. And since more educated women consistently have lower fertility, future fertility is likely to decline as the more educated girls enter reproductive age. Disregarding this important structural change leads to higher projections of future fertility.
Another difference lies in the reading of the current fertility levels in Africa as well as in China. The UN assumes that fertility in Nigeria has been stagnant at 6 children per woman for the past decade and for this reason their purely statistical model results in very slow future decline. However, the most recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS 2013) for Nigeria shows that fertility has already declined to 5.5—a level the UN assumes would only be reached by 2020-25.
The same is true for other African countries such as Mali where the DHS shows fertility has already fallen to 6.1 a value that according to the UN projections would only be reached in 2025-30. For China, currently still the world’s biggest country, the UN assumes that fertility stands at 1.66 and will not decline further but rather increase in the future. Based on expert reasoning the IIASA projections assume that fertility in 2010 was around 1.5 and will decline to 1.4 in the coming decades, following the patterns of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong which are currently in the 1.0 – 1.4 range.
Population pyramids for Nigeria show IIASA’s projected population and education levels for 2010 and 2050. Source: Wittgenstein Centre Data Explorer
References:
Lutz W, Butz W, and KC S, eds. 2014 World Population and Global Human Capital in the 21st Century, Oxford University Press 2014.
Patrick Gerland, Adrian E. Raftery, Hana Ševčíková, Nan Li, Danan Gu, Thomas Spoorenberg, Leontine Alkema, Bailey K. Fosdick, Jennifer Chunn, Nevena Lalic, Guiomar Bay, Thomas Buettner, Gerhard K. Heilig, and John Wilmoth. 2014. World population stabilization unlikely this century. Science 1257469 [DOI:10.1126/science.1257469]
Lutz W, Sanderson WC, Scherbov S. 1997. Doubling of world population unlikely. Nature, 387(6635):803-805 (19 June 1997) www.nature.com/nature/journal/v387/n6635/full/387803a0.html
Lutz W, Sanderson WC, Scherbov S. 2001. The end of world population growth. Nature, 412(6846):543-545 (2 August 2001) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/35087589
Wolfgang Lutz. 2014. A Population Policy Rationale for the Twenty-First Century. Population and Development Review. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2014.00696.x
You must be logged in to post a comment.