05 - World Population Seminar - 16 January 2007

Jesus Crespo Cuaresma & Wolfgang Lutz

Human Capital, Age Structure, and Economic Growth

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Seminar Summary

In collaboration with the Vienna Institute of Demography, IIASA's World Population Program has developed a new dataset of educational attainment by age and sex for 120 countries for the period 1970–2000. The consistency of this new data is superior to existing historical datasets which have many gaps in time and changes in definition. Further, the new dataset also adjusts past enrollment rates as they are influenced by the different mortality rates that vary with people's level of education.

By exploiting the demographic dimension of the education data, the researchers show human capital is better able to explain differences in income per capita across countries. In addition, when using the new data, aggregate changes in educational attainment are a robust determinant of economic growth. This unique data collection also provides a deeper insight into the importance of the age structure of human capital in technology adoption.

More about IIASA's World Population Program

Speaker Biographies

Dr. Jesus Crespo Cuaresma joined IIASA's World Population Program in October 2006 to work on the new project on Human Capital and Economic Growth.

Jesus Crespo Cuaresma holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Vienna, as well as a second doctorate (Habilitation) in economics from the same University. He is an associate professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Vienna and a scientific advisor to the Österreichische Nationalbank. He is working on applied macroeconometrics, economic growth, forecasting, business cycle research, and monetary and fiscal policy. He has published numerous articles on such issues in refereed scientific journals and books.

Professor Wolfgang Lutz is the leader of IIASA's World Population Program. He joined IIASA in October 1985.

Wolfgang Lutz holds a Ph.D. in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania (1983) and a second doctorate (Habilitation) from the University of Vienna. He has worked on family demography, fertility analysis, population projection, and the interaction between population and environment.

He has been conducting a series of in-depth studies on population–development–environment interactions in Mexico, several African countries, and Asia. He is the author of the series of world population projections produced at IIASA and has developed approaches for projecting education and human capital.

He is also principal investigator of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis funded by the Wellcome Trust with headquarters at the National University of Singapore.

Professor Lutz is author and editor of 28 books and more than 150 refereed articles (including some in Science and Nature). He serves on the board of directors of the African Population and Health Research Center in Nairobi, Kenya; the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany; and the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, DC, USA.

Wolfgang Lutz's CV

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Last updated: 03 Apr 2009