World Population Program

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Nathan Keyfitz, leader of IIASA's Population Program from 1983 to 1991 and IIASA Deputy Director during 1992, passed away on April 6, 2010, at the age of 96. Keyfitz was one of the giants of demography. He is credited for developing the field of mathematical demography and at IIASA he also pioneered the application of demographic methods to several other fields.

Nathan came to IIASA in 1983 from Harvard University, where he was the Andelot Professor of Sociology Emeritus. Previously, he had been a professor at the University of Toronto (1959-1963), the University of Chicago (1963-1968), and the University of California, Berkeley (1968-1972).

It was at Chicago that Nathan began to apply mathematical tools and computer technology to the analysis of demographic data. In 1968 he published his groundbreaking Introduction to the Mathematics of Population that described his methodology.

At IIASA he increasingly applied these demographic methods to areas outside of demography as he flourished in IIASA’s interdisciplinary atmosphere in areas such as sustainable development and foreign aid. Much of the work IIASA’s Population Program is doing today – from applications of the multi-state model to probabilistic population projections to population-environment analysis – has its roots in Nathan’s creative ideas.

After leading IIASA's Population Program, Nathan became an Institute Scholar from 1992 to 1993, and served as IIASA's Deputy Director from April to October 1992, when he led the organization of the major 1992 IIASA conference on the challenges for systems analysis in the nineties and beyond. Nathan also established an association for IIASA alumni, known as the IIASA Society, which today has nearly 900 members.

Nathan, who was married to Beatrice (Orkin) Keyfitz from 1939 until her death in October 2009, had two children, Barbara and Robert.

We were privileged to have him at IIASA and we will always treasure his memory. He was exceedingly dedicated to IIASA and an incredibly kind and humble person given his seminal contributions to research.

A memorial service honoring the life of Nathan Keyfitz will be held at 1 p.m. on April 13 at the Bigelow Chapel in Mount Auburn Cemetery (580 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA). More

An online guestbook for personal condolences can be found at Boston.com

Wolfgang Lutz, Nebojsa Nakicenovic and Detlof von Winterfeldt

The European Demographic Data Sheet 2010 and Asian Demographic & Human Capital Data Sheet 2008 are available online (download as PDF).
Click here for more information about the Asian Demographic and Human Capital Data Sheet 2008

Human population matters for sustainable development in two important ways. First, it is an agent of change, inducing many of the environmental, economic and social changes in the world that give rise to concerns about the sustainability of current development paths. Second, the human population and its living conditions are the ultimate objects of development, with long-term human survival, health and well-being serving as criteria for judging whether development is sustainable or not.

Since the early days of IIASA, its population research activities (POP) have dealt with both the determinants and the consequences of population trends on global, regional, national and sub-national level.

Beyond its firm foundation in formal demography POP research has greatly benefited from the interdisciplinary setting at IIASA, which has been a constant stimulus to look beyond the boundaries of demography and respond to the questions of how alternative future population trends may influence the rest of the world and how in turn changes in society, economy and the natural environment feed back on the human population by influencing its health and mortality, its migratory patterns, and its reproductive behavior.

POP aims at combining creative cutting-edge research (published in top journals, disciplinary journals as well as comprehensive books) with extensive global networking (e.g. POPNET, Asian MetaCentre, APHRC, Vienna Institute of Demography VID and www.populationeurope.org) and science-policy dialogue (e.g. Global Science Panel on Population and Environment).

The current 5-year research plan for the 2006-2010 foresees a further strengthening of previous work on population forecasting and the dynamics of global population ageing as well as in the field of population-development-environment (PDE) interactions together with a new emphasis on human capital formation.

In this new focal area of human capital dynamics we are in the midst of using demographic methods to reconstruct the populations by age, sex and level of educational attainment for 120 countries till 1970. This uniquely comprehensive human capital data set is also the basis for a new POP project on human capital and economic growth which will estimate the aggregate level returns to education. First results show much more significant and consistent positive effects than previous studies based on other data could show.

How it began...

The first formal population activities began in 1974 and were merged into the Human Settlement and Services (HSS) Program. The main emphasis was on international migration, and under the leadership of Andrei Rogers, IIASA became the cradle of the methods of multi-state population analysis. In 1983 Nathan Keyfitz took over the leadership of IIASA's population activities which were then renamed the Population Project (POP). It was one of the few places that studied the possible impacts of population aging in a systematic manner. Keyfitz was one of the first demographers to seriously study the relationships between population and the environment.

Wolfgang Lutz leads the program since 1992, following Nathan Keyfitz (1983-1991) and Andrei Rogers (1974-1983). The research group was renamed from Population Project to the World Population Program in 2004 to put emphasis on POP's core research on global population dynamics.

Responsible for this page: Katja Scherbov
Last updated: 30 Aug 2010