Education and place of residence are the two factors of heterogeneity that delineate most of human demographic behaviours. Beyond demographic behaviour, where populations live and what levels of educational attainment they possess determine greatly other types of behaviour such as type of economic activity, labour force participation, consumption and carbon footprint. Therefore accounting for the compositional effect introduced by these two indicators should be essential for assumptions on future development pathways, particularly because their dynamics are not uniformly linear, and they are most likely to change in space and time.
While there is global data and projections about the present and the potential future of educational attainment of populations (WIC 2015 and Goujon et al. 2016), as well as data on urban and rural populations (United Nations 2014), projections of the population cross-tabulating the two indicators do not exist. The Human Capital Data Lab intends to estimate the population by age, sex, education and place of residence and to analyse the dynamics of change in global human capital distribution across urban and rural areas at the level of countries.
Contact: Anne Goujon
Research team: Ramon Bauer, Sandra Jurasszovich, Samir KC (IIASA), Markus Speringer, Dilek Yildiz