World Population Program

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The European Demographic Data Sheet 2008 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

... to study the population dimension in sustainable development.

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 1984 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 1994, following Nathan Keyfitz (1984-1994) and Andrei Rogers (1974-1984). 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: 25 Sep 2009