Wolfgang Lutz

• Head of Department at University of Vienna

This working paper provides a comprehensive overview of the methodology used to calculate a standardized and internationally comparable productivity-weighted labor force (PWLF) measure that takes into account both the education structure of the population and the quality of the educational system. Education-specific weights are calculated with a Mi...

In the prominent political debates about population decline and ageing, short-term changes in the period total fertility rate (TFR) are the main point of reference, even though they can be heavily distorted by changes in the timing of births. Good alternatives exist, say Wolfgang Lutz, Tomáš Sobotka and Kryštof Zeman, but they are rarely used.

This study projects different dependency ratios under various scenarios of future fertility and tertiary education in Finland to assess how the economic consequences of population aging depend on these trends. Applying a multidimensional demographic approach through a discrete-time microsimulation model, we project the newly introduced productivity...

Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries, has experienced a dramatic decline in fertility since 1985, with a decline in the total fertility rate from 5.5-2.1. International researchers have debated the reasons for this rapid decline, with some studies attributing it primarily to family planning programmes and others pointing at the simultan...

Significance China has the world’s largest national population and is rapidly catching up with the United States in terms of having the status as the world's largest economy. In this context, recent reports about unexpectedly low levels of fertility have given rise to speculation that the resulting population stagnation/decline and rapid aging may...

Significance Attempts at comprehensive quantitative assessments of sustainable development can focus on either determinants or constituents of long-term human well-being. While much research on determinants has relied on economic concepts of capital and inclusive wealth, here we focus on the constituents of well-being using a demographic approach....

Significance After a rapid expansion of primary school enrollment rates in many developing countries starting around 2000, progress toward development goals was widely acknowledged. However, the comprehensive focus on tested literacy skills presented in this paper shows that, in many countries, this expansion in quantity came at the expense of qual...

The human capital of the working age population has in the past shown to be a key driver not only of economic growth and poverty reduction but also of health, quality of institutions, and adaptive capacity to environmental change. Human capital has mostly been measured in terms of mean years of schooling of the population or the highest educational...

Significance Migration is one of the most controversial political topics in industrialized countries. One important aspect is population aging and the prospects of a shrinking labor force in case of low or no immigration. We address this aspect systematically through multidimensional microsimulations for all European Union (EU) member states. The o...

Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries, has experienced a dramatic fertility decline since 1985 with the TFR declining from 5.5 to 2.1. The reasons for this rapid decline have been controversially discussed by international researchers with some studies attributing it primarily to family planning programs others point at the simultaneousl...

Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries, has experienced a dramatic fertility decline since 1985 with the TFR declining from 5.5 to 2.1. The reasons for this rapid decline have been controversially discussed by international researchers with some studies attributing it primarily to family planning programs others point at the simultaneousl...

Dominant research modes are not enough to guide the societal transformations necessary to achieve the 2030 Agenda. Researchers, practitioners, decision makers, funders and civil society should work together to achieve universally accessible and mutually beneficial sustainability science.

Objective Although under-five mortality rate (U5MR) is declining in India, it is still high in a few selected states and among the scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) population of the country. This study re-examines the association between caste and under-five deaths in high focus Indian states following the implementation of the country...

Significance Global environmental change and discussions about the drivers of international migration lead to renewed interest in population growth and global demographic change. The notion of the demographic dividend was introduced to highlight the benefits of fertility decline, yet, among African leaders, it is also often interpreted as describin...

Over the recent decades, the EU has been shaped by population growth, but now its population is ageing. Together with North America and East Asia, the EU is moving towards longer-living, lower-fertility, and higher-educated societies. Facing this new demographic frontier naturally prompts the questions: Who will live and work in Europe in the comin...

Significant reductions in mortality are reflected in strong increases in life expectancy particularly in industrialized countries. Previous analyses relate these improvements primarily to medical innovations and advances in health-related behaviors. Mostly ignored, however, is the question to what extent the gains in life expectancy are related to...

Significance The future pace of fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa is the main determinant of future world population growth and will have massive implications for Africa and the rest of the world, not least through international migration pressure and difficulties in meeting the sustainable development goals. In this context, there have been...

Objective: Although under-five mortality (U5M) is declining in India, it is still high in a few selected states and among the scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) population of the country. This study re-examines the association between castes and U5M in high focus Indian states following the implementation of the country's National Rural...

Background Pressures to keep immigration rates at relatively high levels are likely to persist in most developed countries. At the same time, immigrant cohorts are becoming more and more diverse, leading host societies to become increasingly heterogeneous across multiple dimensions. For scholars who study demographic or socio-economic behaviours, t...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) consist of 17 goals with 169 targets and 230 indicators. They provide a wide-ranging set of partly overlapping and partly contradictory social, economic and environmental goals which are important in their own rights but are almost impossible to measure in their entirety to assess whether overall there has b...

Within the next decade India is expected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country due to still higher fertility and a younger population. Around 2025 each country will be home to around 1.5 billion people. India is demographically very heterogeneous with some rural illiterate populations still having more than four children on average...

The Asian data sheet provides a window on indicators related to demographic changes and education processes in the countries of the region. It also includes data on labor force participation and urbanization. For each indicator, the data sheet allows a comparison between three data points: 2000, 2015 and 2030 according to a medium scenario projecti...

Rethinking Society for the 21st Century - by International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) July 2018

People are the agents of change and people are empowered to improve their own lives and those of others primarily through education and health.

Wolfgang Lutz umreißt den Wert probabilistischer Prognosen und Szenarien in der Bevölkerungsforschung und betont den gesellschaftlichen Auftrag der Demografie als Interventionswissenschaft. In Deutschland wie auch in Österreich herrsche ein evidentes Missverhältnis zwischen der Wichtigkeit demografischer Fragstellungen und dem Maß demografischer Fo...

This chapter provides the background necessary for understanding our approach to projecting population and human capital. First, we investigate the proper place of education in demographic analysis and the evidence for an underlying causal relationship between education and demographic outcomes. Second, we emphasize the importance of explicit assum...

This is the first of three chapters that present the population projections by age, sex, and level of educational attainment for all countries in the world with a time horizon of 2060, and extensions to 2100. Before discussing the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (WIC) projections, however, it is worth stepping back to co...

The number of people inhabiting the earth has fluctuated significantly over the course of human history, in response to both natural changes in the environment and stresses to local habitats created by the populations themselves. From the first appearance of Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago in Africa until about 35,000 years ago, the world’s hum...

Condensed into a detailed analysis and a selection of continent-wide datasets, this revised edition of World Population & Human Capital in the Twenty-First Century addresses the role of educational attainment in global population trends and models. Presenting the full chapter text of the original edition alongside a concise selection of data, it su...

Significance In 2015, all countries of the world agreed to an ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including 169 specific targets. Whether these goals will be achieved and lead to the desired sustainability transition will depend on the degree to which they can energize and mobilize policy makers, donors, nongovernmental organizations...

In seeking to understand how future societies will be affected by climate change we cannot simply assume they will be identical to those of today, because climate and societies are both dynamic. Here we propose that the concept of demographic metabolism and the associated methods of multi-dimensional population projections provide an effective anal...

The immigrants living in France and the refugees who arrived in Austria are more educated than most of the population in their country of origin. By comparison with the population in the host country, the picture is more mixed: some groups, such as immigrants from Portugal living in France, are relatively low educated, while others, such as Romania...

Significance The future of world population growth matters for future human well-being and interactions with the natural environment. We show the extent to which world population growth could be reduced by fully implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) whose health and education targets have direct and indirect consequences on future m...

Since its inception in 2010, the Arab Spring has evolved into a situation of violent conflict in many countries, leading to high levels of migration from the affected region. Given the social impact of the large number of individuals applying for asylum across Europe in 2015, it is important to study who these persons are in terms of their skills,...

This paper presents the overview of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and their energy, land use, and emissions implications. The SSPs are part of a new scenario framework, established by the climate change research community in order to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation...

We hereby present a dataset produced at the Wittgenstein Centre (WIC) containing comprehensive time series on educational attainment and mean years of schooling (MYS). The dataset is split by 5-year age groups and sex for 171 countries and covers the period between 1970 and 2010. It also contains projections of educational attainment to 2060 based...

We propose a methodological framework aimed at obtaining projections of the Human Development Index (HDI) that can be used to assess the degree of vulnerability of future societies to extreme climatic events. By combining recent developments in the modeling and projection of population by age, sex, and educational attainment, our modeling set-up en...

In this paper we describe an innovative aspect of the population module in the context of an ongoing comprehensive modelling effort to assess future populationenvironment interactions through specific case studies. A particular focus of our study is the vulnerability of coastal populations to environmental factors and their future adaptive capacity...

BACKGROUND Recent stalls in fertility decline have been observed in a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and so far no plausible common reason has been identified in the literature. This paper develops the hypothesis that these fertility stalls could be associated with stalls in the progress of education among the women of the relevant cohorts, p...

This paper addresses the contribution of changes in population size and structures to greenhouse gas emissions and to the capacity to adapt to climate change. The paper goes beyond the conventional focus on the changing composition by age and sex. It does so by addressing explicitly the changing composition of the population by level of educational...

Countries in Sub-African countries that are classified as having experienced stalled fertility declines after 2000 also experienced a discontinuity in the progress of educational improvement for cohorts of women that during the 1980 were in their primary school ages. While the proportion of young women without any formal education had been graduall...

Over the coming years, enormous amounts of money will likely be spent on adaptation to climate change. The international community recently made pledges of up to $100 billion per year by 2020 for the Green Climate Fund. Judging from such climate finance to date, funding for large projects overwhelmingly goes to engineers to build seawalls, dams, or...

In their Report “World population stabilization unlikely this century” (10 October, p. [234][1]; published online 18 September), P. Gerland et al. used a United Nations (UN) 2012 assessment to support their claim that the population will not peak this century, despite our earlier work indicating

Human use of natural resources has continued to increase dramatically in recent years, as a result of complex linkages between increasing population and increasing per capita consumption. This has begun to have significant effects on the planet’s climate and long-term life-support functions. Future projections of human population range over an orde...

This paper applies the methods of multi-dimensional mathematical demography to project national populations based on alternative assumptions on future, fertility, mortality, migration and educational transitions that correspond to the five shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP) storylines. In doing so it goes a significant step beyond past population...

In this paper, we translate the five narratives as defined by the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) research community into five alternative demographic scenarios using projections by age, sex and level of education for 171 countries up to 2100. The scenarios represent a significant step beyond past population scenarios used in the Intergovernme...

The collection of articles in this Special Feature is part of a larger project on "Forecasting Societies' Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change" (an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council to Wolfgang Lutz). In investigating how global change will affect population vulnerability to climate variability and extremes, the project aims to help de...

Background: When asked what a desirable fertility level for populations might be, most politicians, journalists, and even social scientists would say it is around two children per woman, a level that has been labelled by demographers "replacement-level fertility." The reasons given for considering this level of fertility as something to aim at usua...

The effect of changes in age structure on economic growth has been widely studied in the demography and population economics literature. The beneficial effect of changes in age structure after a decrease in fertility has become known as the "demographic dividend." In this article, we reassess the empirical evidence on the associations among economi...

In this paper, we challenge the widespread notion that replacement level fertility is the most desirable level of fertility both for countries currently above and below this level. We discuss possible alternative criteria for choosing one fertility level over another. In accordance with earlier studies, we focus on age dependency as the sole criter...

Background: Depending on whether the global level of fertility is assumed to converge to the current European TFR (~1.5) or that of Southeast Asia or Central America (~2.5), global population will either decline to 2.3-2.9 billion by 2200 or increase to 33-37 billion, if mortality continues to decline. Furthermore, sizeable human populations exist...

In the context of still uncertain specific effects of climate change in specific locations, this paper examines whether education significantly increases coping capacity with regard to particular climatic changes, and whether it improves the resilience of people to climate risks in general. Our hypothesis is that investment in universal primary and...

The highly acclaimed The Future Population of the World contains the most authoritative assessment available of the extent to which population is likely to grow over the next 50 to 100 years. The book provides a thorough analysis of all the components of population change and translates these factors into a series of projections for the population...

Demography is the science of populations. Demographers research how these change through three important processes: birth patterns, mortality and migration. They also research into changes in education and health. They use these factors to describe how people populate the Earth, how nations and societies are formed and cultures created. Demographer...

Pakistan faces today high levels of population growth entailing a large population of schooling age, and low levels of economic development, with increasing spread of poverty and unemployment over the past few decades. While education has been emphasized by the government and international development agencies to play a central role for the success...

Syntheses routes for the conversion of autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) waste into aluminosilicate zeolites like LTA and related phases were developed. The procedures always started with leaching steps of the pure AAC waste by combinations of strong alkaline (NaOH) and mild acid (citric acid) treatments, before the real crystallization process was...

Research on the social determinants of health has often considered education and economic resources as separate indicators of socioeconomic status. From a policy perspective, however, it is important to understand the relative strength of the effect of these social factors on health outcomes, particularly in developing countries. It is also importa...

Discussions about fertility in developed countries refer almost exclusively to the period Total Fertility Rate (TFR). We argue that the use of this indicator frequently leads to incorrect interpretations of period fertility levels and trends, resulting in distorted policy conclusions and, potentially, in misguided policies. We illustrate this with...