Human Capital and Migration
Anne Goujon
This group adopts a global perspective in studying the past, present and future of global human capital. We integrate this ‘quality’ dimension into standard demographic analysis and population projection methodology to explore how the global population outlook depends on further progress in education. Changes in the quantity of formal education at the country level depend on a number of factors including today’s education structure, future school enrolment rates, mother’s education and overall birth and death rates.
Since improvement in the educational attainment of adult populations tend to result in lower population growth rates, international migration has become increasingly important in determining whether a country’s human capital grows or declines. While people have always been on the move, patterns are now changing and many more developed countries see sharp increases in skilled immigrants. The rise in global inequality means that labour and skilled migration is likely to grow, both in numbers and consequences.
Over coming decades, environmental factors are set to become a central aspect not only of migration’s causes and consequences but also of the vulnerability of populations. We adopt a systems approach to the environmental dimensions of human capital and emphasize the importance of education for improving the resilience and reducing the vulnerability of people to the negative consequences of climate change.
The research interest of the multidisciplinary “Human Capital and Migration” Group lies at the interface between demography, education policy & planning, sociology and population geography. The group’s main themes are outlined below.
Activities in 2012-2013
Preparation of inputs related to base-year population, migration, fertility and education transition to the Oxford-WIC science-based human capital projections (and back projections) to be released in 2013
Ramon Bauer and Michaela Potancokova, together with Anne Goujon and Samir K.C. (IIASA) are completing the major global data collection and harmonization exercise which started in 2011 on data on the level of educational attainment of populations from censuses and surveys to develop the base year data. The final dataset will include some 170 countries. The exercise is documented in an IIASA Interim Report (Bauer et al. 2012). Validation will be conducted early 2013.
Nikola Sander and Guy Abel are modeling the age-structure of international migration flows using model migration schedules for groups of origin and destination by linking WiC international migration flow estimates (GA) with the World Bank/OECD Database on Immigrants in OECD countries. They are developing expert-based migration assumptions for use in population projections, and introduced a multiregional model to WiC’s projections.
Michaela Potancokova, together with Samir K.C. (IIASA) and Tomas Sobotka are definitng and documenting the overall fertility assumptions and collection of data on fertility by education for 115 countries, and computations of fertility rate by education in harmonized education categories and estimates of fertility rates by education from DHS for high fertility countries.
Bilal Barakat together with Rachel Durham (WU) are developing the methodology for projections of educational attainment.
Further Research on Migration
Development of the ‘German Internal Migration’ (GIM) database, which holds information on migrant flows between 397 counties (Kreise) with consistent boundaries, covering the period 1990 to 2010 and allowing new insights into trends and patterns of internal migration in Germany (data are publicly available online).
For more information, contact Nikola Sander.
Human Capital and Climate change
Exploration of the role of education as a protective factor that can bring about positive outcomes e.g. adaptive capacity, disaster preparedness, coping abilities and health. This was looked at in different settings establishing collaboration with epidemiologists in investigating the relationships between education and health outcomes and conducting two surveys (community survey and household survey) in Phang Nga, Thailand on the issues of climate change adaptation and disaster preparedness.
For more information, contact Raya Muttarak.
Further Research on Human Capital
- Production of the Asian datasheet (published in August 2012) on demographic and human capital trends and projections, Download here
- Human Capital in Pakistan with the Population Council
- Future prospects of education and labor force participation in Egypt
- Human Capital –Old age Dependency Ratio
- Historical data on education