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News & Highlights of 2008

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Election to the Austrian Academy of Sciences
In 2008 Wolfgang Lutz was elected as a corresponding member (kMI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

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Leader of IIASA's World Population Program, Professor Wolfgang Lutz, has been awarded the inaugural Advanced Investigator Grant of the European Research Council. The ambitious study, “Forecasting societies’ adaptive capacity to climate change”, has been granted approximately 2.5 million Euros over five years to address a key knowledge gap concerning the likely impact of climate change on human wellbeing. More




Click for detailed Data Sheets Below:




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News & Highlights of 2007

MicMac Meeting on Assumptions on Future Mortality and Morbidity Trends in Europe

September 10 - September 11, 2007
Location: IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria

Organizer(s):
Wolfgang Lutz (IIASA)
Frans Willekens (NIDI)
N.L. van der Gaag (NIDI)

Agenda and list of participants
(Posted Sep 2007)

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The World Population Program welcomes Victor Garcia Guerrero. Victor received a BSc. degree in actuary and an M.Eng. degree in operations research, both from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). He has a diploma in advanced econometrics from the Faculty of Economics at UNAM and has also taught econometrics at the Faculty of Sciences. He is currently working on his PhD in population studies at El Colegio de Mexico A.C. His dissertation is about population projections and policies in Mexico, undertaking a critical review of the official population projections and developing an alternative probabilistic methodology.

Mr. Garcia Guerrero joined the World Population Program in September 2007 to develop a probabilistic methodology to project the Mexican population. His main academic interests are: formal demography, mathematical modeling, population policy making, and historical demography.
(Posted Sep 2007)

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Welcome Young Scientists: Fifty-one post-graduate students from 20 countries have arrived at IIASA for our annual Young Scientists Summer Program. In the next three months, senior scientists will guide the young scholars as they pursue their chosen research topics. The program offers a unique opportunity for them to enhance their research skills and become part of a worldwide network of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural specialists.

The World Population Program welcomes

• Ms. Naomi Aoki: Ph.D. student at The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University (Department of Public Administration);
• Ms. Nikola Sander: Ph.D. student at the School of Geography, Planning and Architecture, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; and
• Mr. Edward Spang: Ph.D. student at the Fletcher School

[more details about the YSSPers]
(Posted June 2007)

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Population Association of America (PAA)
2007 Annual Meeting, New York, NY, March 29-31

P-3F METHODS AND APPLIED DEMOGRAPHY
63 Reconstruction of Populations by Age, Sex and Level of Educational Attainment for 120 Countries for 1970-2000 Using Demographic Back-Projection Methods • Wolfgang Lutz (IIASA); Samir KC, IIASA; Anne Goujon (VID and IIASA)
WINNING POSTER

102 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LOW FERTILITY
3 New Empirical Evidence on the Low Fertility Trap Hypothesis • Wolfgang Lutz (IIASA), and Vegard Skirbekk (IIASA)

P-7H GENDER, RACE/ETHNICITY, RELIGION
70 New Times, Old Beliefs: Projecting the Future Size of Religions in Austria, Canada and Switzerland • Anne Goujon (VID and IIASA); Vegard Skirbekk (IIASA); Katrin Fliegenschnee (VID)

(Posted April 2007)

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The World Population Program welcomes Emma Terämä.

Emma Terämä received her Doctor of Science degree in technology from the Helsinki University of Technology in 2007. She concentrated on atomistic modeling and supercomputing of biological systems such as cell membranes. She was an Erasmus-scholar at the Freie Universität in Berlin during her master's studies, and a Research Scholar at the University of California at Davis in between her PhD studies.

Dr. Terämä's interest in sustainable development projects arouse during 11 years of UNICEF-work and chairing the Helsinki volunteer group. She is using the modeling experience gathered during her physicist years and applying it to demography. The issues that interest her the most pertain to AIDS and other globally important health topics, education, and local human-environment interactions.
(Posted April 2007)

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IIASA’s World Population Program and the Cairo Demographic Center have finished a study on projecting future population and human capital growth at the level of governorates in Egypt. Their findings were presented March 7th at a symposium at the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology.

Executive summary (PDF): High resolution -- Low resolution (fax print quality)

Project Report (PDF): Anne Goujon, Huda Alkitkat, Wolfgang Lutz, and Isolde Prommer. Population and Human Capital Growth in Egypt:
Projections for Governorates to 2051. Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA Interim Report IR-07-010 [March 2007, 116 pp]

(Posted March 2007)

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February 2007: Sergei Scherbov gave an interview in the central and most influential Belorussian newspaper Belarus Today. During his last trip to Minsk, Sergei gave a presentation to parlament members and represenantives of executive power describing the future of their population. There were plenty of interviews, TV and radio programs devoted to this event. This interview, with reference to IIASA, is a central one : sb.by/print.php?articleID=56829

(Posted Feb 2007)

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Jesus Crespo Cuaresma & Wolfgang Lutz
Human Capital, Age Structure, and Economic Growth
World Population Seminar - 16 January 2007

Slides [PPT] Listen [MP3 1:01:06]

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 the speaker at IIASA's Publications Department website
Or W. Lutz's CV and J.C.Cuaresma's biography

To subscribe to IIASA Podcasts, copy and paste the following address into your podcasting software: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Publications/podcast/iipod.xml

(Posted Jan 2007)

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The World Population Program welcomes Tapas MISHRA: Before joining the IIASA's Postdoctoral Program, Tapas Mishra completed his doctoral research in economics specializing in macroeconomics, demography and non-stationary econometrics from Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. Mr. Mishra's research focuses on studying consequences of stochastic demographic system on economic growth and development by exploiting their non-stationary temporal and spatial features. Over the past years he has specialized in the empirics of economic growth and has also worked on demographic and demography-based income projections, and the study of variations of cross-country economic growth by introducing stochastic environment, demography and economic growth system. He has had several years of experience in working for international and national economy policy making bodies. Check his CV for a detailed list of publications and areas of research.
(Posted Jan. 2007)

2006

The New Generations of Europeans
Demography and Families in the Enlarged European Union
Edited by Wolfgang Lutz, Rudolf Richter and Chris Wilson, © IIASA and Earthscan 2006

About the Editors
Table of Contents
Ordering Information
Book link at publisher

From the series "Population and Sustainable Development," providing fresh ways of thinking about population trends and impacts.

Europe today is characterized by aging populations, changing family patterns, dropping fertility rates and mass migration. With the potentially massive ramifications this has for pensions, health, housing, transport, family relations, employment and other sectors of society, The New Generations of Europeans sets out to assess what it is to be a citizen of a growing EU and what important demographic, social, and economic issues will have to be faced by European decision makers. Edited by leading demographers and sociologists, and made up of contributions from respected researchers in the fields of population and society from different parts of Europe, it presents the results of five years of research by the European Observatory on the Social Situation, Demography and the Family.

With the aid of over 100 graphs and tables and a full discussion, this book asks how numerous, fertile and long-lived the new generations of European citizens will be. The state of families, immigration and health are all examined, especially in the context of the challenges that will be faced in maintaining social cohesion. Crucially, the question of how demographic changes will impact Europe’s socioeconomic infrastructure is woven throughout.
(Posted Nov. 10, 2006)

Despite the current problems with European integration, younger Europeans tend to have a European identity in addition to their national one. So concluded IIASA demographers Wolfgang Lutz (also of the Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Vegard Skirbekk together with Sylvia Kritzinger of the Institute of Advanced Studies after studying Eurobarometer data. See POPNET for a reprint from Science.
(Posted Oct. 2006)

EUROPE is the theme of the new POPNET newsletter

The Forces Driving Unprecedented Population Ageing
° European Demographic Data Sheet 2006
° Tempo Effect and Adjusted TFR
° Range of Likely Future Trends in the EU-25
Reprint from Science:
° The Demography of Growing European Identity (Supporting Online Material. This supplement contains: Introductory Text / Materials and Methods / Tables A1 to A4 / References. Download supplement at Science (PDF) or at IIASA (PDF)
The New Generations of Europeans

Download POPNET No. 38, Autumn 2006 (PDF)
(Posted Oct. 2006)

The World Population Program welcomes Jesus Crespo Cuaresma. Jesus will work on a new project on Human Capital and Economic Growth.
Email: crespo@iiasa.ac.at

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.
(Posted Sep. 2006)

7. September 2006
Symposium of the NÖ Landesakademie
Theme: „Europa, der alternde Kontinent“ (Europe theaging continent)
(Posted Sep. 2006)

IIASA at the European Population Conference 2006

The "European Population Conference 2006" was organized by the "European Association for Population Studies". This international conference took place this year in Liverpool from the 21th until the 24th June and was entitled: "Population Challenges in Ageing Societies ".

Scientists of IIASA's World Population Program presented the following papers:

Session 16: Bridging the micro-macro gap in forecasting. Where do assumptions come from?: Investigating the substantive basis for population projections in Europe.
Wolfgang Lutz, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) & Vienna Institute of Demography (VID); Samir K.C., IIASA; Isolde Prommer, IIASA; Christopher Wilson, IIASA

Session 57: Managing regular and irregular migration. Chair: Wolfgang Lutz, IIASA & VID

Session 66: New Times, Old Beliefs: Predicting the Future of Religions in Austria (2001-2051). Anne Goujon, VID & IIASA; Vegard Skirbekk, IIASA; Katrin Fliegenschnee, VID; Pawel Strzelecki, Warsaw School of Economics

Session 73: A New Effort to Reconstruct the Population by Age, Sex and Level of Education for all Countries since 1970. Samir KC, IIASA; Anne Goujon, VID & IIASA; Wolfgang Lutz, IIASA & VID
(Posted July 2006)

A comprehensive demographic data sheet (poster) for 46 European countries shows newly computed fertility indicators and projections. It is the work of IIASA's World Population Program in collaboration with the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Population Reference Bureau.
Ask for a free copy.
(Posted June 2006)

Welcome Young Scientists
Forty-nine post-graduate students from 18 countries arrived at IIASA on Thursday, June 1st for IIASA's 2006 Young Scientists Summer Program (pdf). During the next three months, senior scientists will guide the students as they pursue their chosen research topics.

The World Population welcomes Marcin Stonawski from the Department of Demography at Cracow University of Economics, Poland.
(Posted June 2006)

Apply Now for IIASA's Postdoctoral Program
IIASA's post-doctoral program. Click for details.We are now accepting applications for our annual postdoctoral program. Each year IIASA selects two post-graduate researchers to receive full funding for a 12-24 month stay at IIASA. The application deadline is August 15th, 2006. Details. Application form.
(Posted May 2006)

Tomorrow's People: the Challenges of Technologies for Life Extension and Enhancement
Logo of James Martin Institute. Click to enlarge. On March 17th, Wolfgang Lutz of IIASA's Population Program addressed the first Global Forum on Tomorrow's People: the Challenges of Technologies for Life Extension and Enhancement at the James Martin Institute of the University of Oxford, UK. See and hear his talk on Global Population Ageing and the World's Future Human Capital (Requires Real Player. Lutz begins speaking 10 minutes into the video).
(Posted March 2006)

IIASA’s World Population Program is co-organizing an International Conference on Population and Development in Asia, planned for 20-22 March in Phuket, Thailand. The event will mark the end of the first six-year program of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis, which is being funded as a Regional Centre of Excellence by the Wellcome Trust.
(Posted March)

The World Population welcomes Joze Sambt.
Joze Sambt is a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He graduated and finished his master's degree at that faculty and is currently a PhD candidate. He joined the World Population Program in February 2006 as a Guest Research Scholar.
(Posted March 2006)

Europe Faces Demographic Challenges
In the context of Austria's EU presidency, a high-level conference on Demographic Challenges was held in the Vienna Hofburg February 1-2. At the meeting, Wolfgang Lutz, leader of IIASA’s World Population Program, presented a summary of the demographic challenges confronting Europe and chaired the concluding panel discussion.
(Posted January)

The World Population welcomes Sarah Staveteig (University of California at Berkeley, USA)
Peccei Scholar, January - March 2006

Sarah was chosen for her work on the issue of "Relative Cohort Size and the Risk of Civil War, 1961-2001".
(Posted January)

2005

Oct 2005: Asia is the theme of the new POPNET newsletter (pdf) from IIASA's World Population Program

• The "Asian Century" Will Be Based on Human Capital
• Population-Environment Interactions in Coastal Areas of Asia after the Tsunami
• Update from the Asian MetaCentre
• Reprint from Nature: Average Remaining Lifetimes Can Increase Human Populations Age
• International Meeting on "Postponement of Childbearing in Europe"
• Asian MetaCentre Conference on "Population and Development in Asia: Critical Issues for a Sustainable Future"

Sept 2005: The World Population Program welcomes Mr. Joshua R. Goldstein

Joshua R. Goldstein is associate professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and a faculty associate of Princeton's Office of Population Research. He is on leave at IIASA for one year. He holds a Ph.D. in Demography from the University of California at Berkeley (1996). He has worked in family demography, the demography and mixing of ethnic groups, aging, and mathematical demography. His current project, the Changing Ages of Man, is a comparative, historical project on longevity and the human life course.

July 2005: A ministerial-level conference in Brussels July 11–12 addressed demographic challenges facing the European Union.

This was the first meeting at this level to explicitly deal with the issues of how policy could influence demographic trends. The conference rapporteur was Wolfgang Lutz, leader of IIASA's World Population Program.

July 2005:
Sanderson, W.C. and Scherbov, S. 2005. Average Remaining Lifetimes Can Increase as Human Populations Age. Nature, 345:811-813

In the issue 345 of Nature, researchers Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov of IIASA's World Population Program suggest a new perspective on population ageing and the sustainability of pension systems in countries like the US, Germany and Japan. As remaining life expectancy increases, people remain relatively young for longer. A gradual increase in retirement age, they suggest, might be fairer and more sustainable than current pension systems, which favors older generations. Press release (pdf). More.
(Posted June 2005)

IIASA Reprint RP-05-006:
The article can be order at the Publication Department for a handling charge of $10.00.

June 2005: The World Population Program warmly welcomes five participants of IIASA's Young Scientist Summer Program 2005:

Mr. Jean-Christophe Fotso, Mr. Frederick Mugisha, and Mr. Zewdu Woubalem from the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Nairobi, Kenya; Ms. Ying Ji from the Institute of Population Research at the Peking University, China; and Mr. Pawel Strzelecki from the Institute of Statistics and Demography at the Warsaw School of Economics, Poland. Click here to read their Biographical Sketches

May 2005:
Population-Environment Interactions in Coastal Areas of Asia after the Tsunami

A scientific seminar was held in Phuket 9-11 May 2005, to define the joint research program of population-environment interactions in the coastal regions of Asia after the tsunami of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis and IIASA (see earlier posting).

May 2005: The World Population Program welcomes Mr. Samir K.C.

Mr. K.C. is currently in the PhD program at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he is mainly developing a multi-disease multi-state population model for lung diseases for the economic evaluation of the pilot implementation of the "Practical Approach to Lung Health" initiative of the WHO in Nepal.

April 2005: The UNESCO Institute of Statistics recently abandoned its old methodology for literacy projections and adopted instead the multi-state population projection approach developed at IIASA. Wolfgang Lutz and Anne Goujon of IIASA's World Population Program use the approach when forecasting population by age, sex and level of education for all countries of the world.

April 2005: Press Clipping: New light on Egypt's future by John Rowley (People & the Planet).
Click on the link for more information on the PDE project Population, Human Capital and Water in Egypt by IIASA's World Population Program.

March 2005: The World Population Program welcomes Moema Figoli.

Dr. Figoli is a demographer and teaches at the University Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where she received her Ph.D. in demography in 1997. From September 1994 to September 1995, she worked on methodological issues related to her thesis at the University of Chicago, USA. She also participated in the summer program at Michigan University in 2002. She has been working mainly on population forecasting and social security issues.

March 2005: The recipient of this year's Luis Donaldo Colosio Fellowship was announced and the winner is Fernando Riosmena, a Ph.D. candidate in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Masters degree in Demography from the same University, and a B.A. in Marketing from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Fernando Riosmena's main research interests intersect the fields of international migration, formal and social demography, research methodology, and Latin American studies. His doctoral dissertation, "Within, Between, and Beyond: Three Essays on Latin America–US Migration Dynamics," attempts to describe and explain migratory dynamics for Latin American migrants in the United States looking at

He will join the World Population Program for one year beginning September 1st, 2005.

March 2005:
The recent Tsunami disaster has given rise to a joint research program of population-environment interactions in the coastal regions of Asia. In the context of the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis, the research will seek strategies for sustainable coastal reconstruction and development. The photo at left shows Khunying Suchada Kiranandana, President of Chulalongkorn University together with IIASA director Leen Hordijk at the February 25th Bangkok signing of an agreement of scientific collaboration.

January 2005:
The Selection Committee for the Peccei and Mikhalevich Scholarship Awards has completed its review of the 2004 nominations. The two Peccei Scholarships go to Hiroshi Ito of Japan (Adaptive Dynamics Network) and Sarah Staveteig of the United States (World Population Program).

Sarah Staveteig (University of California at Berkeley, USA) was chosen for her work in the World Population Program. Her paper addressed the issue of "Relative Cohort Size and the Risk of Civil War, 1961-2001".
The reviewers: (a )"This is an excellent draft of a paper, that when published, could have a powerful impact on the field of demographic security." (b) "This is an important, thorough and well-written paper, with a good literature review and discussion of the explanations why large youth cohorts may increase the risk of conflict."

More ...

2004

Dec. 2004: The new POPNET is available online now (PDF): No. 36, Autumn 2004
Content
° Population, Human Capital, and Water in Egypt
° Cairo Demographic Center (CDC)
° African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC)
° Former IIASA Researcher Joins UNECA
° Update from the Asian MetaCentre
° IIASA-AED-World Bank Project on Forecasting Human Capital
° Three IIASA PDE Case Studies in Africa
° The End of World Population Growth in the 21st Century
° How to Deal with Uncertainty in Population Forecasting?

Nov. 2004: Some error is inevitable when predicting fertility, mortality and migration, the components of population change. At a meeting in 2002, jointly organized with the Vienna Institute of Demography, leading experts representing alternative approaches to scenario analysis and stochastic population forecasting offered their views on dealing with this uncertainty.Their collected papers are now being reprinted in two special issues of International Statistical Review. Contents and Introduction (pdf).

Aug. 2004: Sanderson, W.C. 2004. The SEDIM Model: Version 0.1. Laxenburg, Austria: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, IR-04-041.

This paper presents the SEDIM (Simple Economic Demographic Interaction Model) Model. The model illustrates how economic, demographic, and technological factors can be integrated into a rich, but still relatively simple framework that predicts rates of economic growth. SEDIM is designed to show the effects of demographic changes, including changes in the education composition of the population on economic performance ...

To download the comeplete report, please click here ...

July 2004: Wolfgang Lutz and Anne Goujon gave presentations at the meeting "Maps to the Future:Workshop on Making Education Projections for Policy", which was held at the Academy for Educational Development, Washington D.C., on July 12, 2004.

Download or view the sildes by Wolfgang Lutz and Anne Goujon

Conference: August 9-10
Population, Human Capital and Water in Egypt
Please visit conference website to view/download the presentations

Organizer(s): World Population Program
Wolfgang Lutz, Program Leader, lutz@iiasa.ac.at
Contact Person:
Marilyn Brandl , brandl@iiasa.ac.at
Phone: +43-2236-807 324
Fax: +43-2236-71313
Co-Organizer(s):
Cairo Demographic Center
Cairo Central Statistical Office
Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo
Institute of National Planning in Cairo
Vienna Institute of Demography

Aug. 2004: Brian O'Neill (POP and GGI)

Brian O'Neill (USA), research scholar at IIASA since 2002, is one of twenty-five recipients of the first European Young Investigator (EURYI) Award. The €1 million award will allow him and his IIASA colleagues to carry out his proposed five year project on "Demography, uncertainty, and learning in integrated assessment models of climate change." The overall aims of the research are to improve integrated assessment models of climate change and to develop new methods of applying them to the climate change issue.
O'Neill's proposal was chosen from among 777 submissions by the Heads of the European Research Organisations (EUROHORCs) in collaboration with the European Science Foundation (ESF).

Some Press Releases:

• Brain-Gain: Award bringt Forscher nach Österreich, 30 July, APA Journal Forschung: Preisträger des ersten EURYI-Awards bekannt gegeben - US-Klimaforscher Brian O'Neill wird in Österreich arbeiten
• Neuer Preis bringt US-Forscher nach Österreich, 30 July, ORF on Science
• Europäische "Champions-League" herausragender Jungforscher, 29 July, Der Standard
  

June 2004: The this year summer students of IIASA's Young Scientists Summer Program arrived! POP hosts Laura Sokka (University of Helsinki, Finland) and Sarah Staveteig (University of California, Berkeley). For mor information on POP's YSSPers please click here...

March 2004: Book presentation at the United Nations, New York, USA (March 25, 2004)
Dr. Wolfgang Lutz and Dr. Warren Sanderson presented the book "The End of World Population Growth in the 21st Century: New Challenges for Human Capital Formation and Sustainable Development" (edited by Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson, and Sergei Scherbov, and published by Earthscan, London, 2004) at the United Nations Headquarters on the occasion of the meeting of the UN Commission of Population and Development. The presentation was hosted by the Austrian Mission.

March 2004: Wolfgang Lutz, Warren C. Sanderson, and Sergei Scherbov, (Eds.). 2004. The End of World Population Growth in the 21st Century: New Challenges for Human Capital Formation and Sustainable Develpment.
London: Earthscan in association with IIASA.
"This book ... will be widely read and highly influential among demographers, economists, and other modelers of long-term dynamic social processes" says Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, referring to the new book edited by Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov of IIASA's World Population Program. Hans van Ginkel, Rector of the UN University calls it "... the most innovative book on population change I have ever seen – a must for all policy and decision makers." More quotations and ordering information (pdf), and more information about the probabilistic population projections click here ...

March 2004: The Secretary-General of the United Nations has appointed Gui-Ying CAO of IIASA’s Population Program to the UN Committee for Development Policy (CDP) for the term 2004–2006. The committee is a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which is responsible for formulating policy recommendations to UN member states and to the UN system on matters pertaining to development.

Jan. 2004: The World Population Program Research Plan for the year 2004 is now available (in PDF format), extracted from the IIASA Research Plan 2004, pp. 71-79. For more details on ongoing and past research follow the navigation menu on the left.

World Population Program Home Page

2003

Dec. 2003: Publication of an article "Long-term population decline in Europe: The relative importance of tempo effects and generation length" (in Population and Development Review 29(4):699-707), by J. Goldstein (Princeton University), W. Lutz, and S. Scherbov. This article is a follow-up to the recent article in Science Magazine.

Oct. 2003: Visit to IIASA by Alex Ezeh, Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Nairobi, a high quality pan-African research institute on population. Agreement of collaboration in which APHRC will serve as POP's regional partner in Africa (similar to the Asian MetaCentre in Singapore)

Sep. 2003. Dramatic population aging may threaten Europe's social and economic well-being. To help policymakers respond to this predicament, IIASA's World Population Program (POP) has recently established collaboration with the Vienna Institute of Demography (of the Austrian Academy of Sciences) and other European demographic institutes. Read the new issue of POPNET (pdf), to learn what POP project leader Wolfgang Lutz and his colleagues say about the European demographic challenge and the work of this alliance. (Posted September 4th, 2003)

Sep. 16, 2003: The POP Program was invited to give a seminar at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. on the IIASA method of projecting human capital formation (Speakers: W. Lutz, A. Goujon, and A. Wils).
Given the World Bank's new priority on education and the fact that IIASA has developed the only multi-state method for projecting the population by level of education, this may be the beginning of intensive future collaboration. More on projecting human capital...

Sep. 2003: The population project developed a new set of four global population projections for use in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a large international scientific effort to assess the current conditions of and future outlook for global ecosystem goods and services.  The population scenarios were derived using a newly developed methodology for designing individual scenarios based on the Program's existing probabilistic projections for the world.
Contact: Brian O'Neill (oneill@iiasa.ac.at).
Click here to receive more information on the population projections.

Aug. 13-20, 2003: 54th Session of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in Berlin:
A special session was organized by W. Lutz on "How to deal with uncertainty in population forecasting?" based on papers resulting from a joint IIASA/Austrian Academy of Sciences workshop in December 2002. The papers will be published in special issues of the International Statistical Review (the official ISI Journal) in March and August 2004.

In Berlin Wolfgang Lutz also spoke at an ISI press conference on current demographic challenges in Europe, which resulted in extensive coverage including the New York Times (Aging Europe Finds Its Pension Is Running), International Herald Tribune (The looming clash of generations) and a number of major Asian newspapers.

March 2003:
"Europe's Population at a Turning Point" by project researchers Wolfgang Lutz, Brian O'Neill, and Sergei Scherbov, appeared in the March 28th issue of Science Magazine (Vol. 299, pp. 1991-1992). The study suggests that the current trend in Europe toward later childbearing could exacerbate future population aging and contribute to a future decline in population size. News release. To download the summary and/or full text click here...

World Population Program Home Page

2002

Global Science Panel Report released at WSSD in Johannesburg, 31 August 2002: The IIASA – IUSSP – UNU Global Science Panel on Population and Environment has completed for the Johannesburg Summit a scientific assessment of the role of population in sustainable development. Population in Sustainable Development: Analyses, Goals, Actions, Realities is now being presented to the delegates. In addition to the panel's statement, the document includes background material on past goals and current trends.

Wils, Annababette (Ed.) 2002. Population-Development-Environment in Mozambique. Laxenburg, Austria: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Interim Report IR-02-049, 136p.
The report is available in PDF format
(posted August 2002)

2002: Members of the IIASA – IUSSP – UNU Global Science Panel on Population and Environment have published a note to the editors of Nature stressing "If we do not put the human population at the core of the sustainable development agenda, our efforts to improve human well-being and preserve the quality of the environment will fail." Signatories include 8 IIASA scientists as well as Maurice Strong and Nafis Sadik. See full statement (pdf) on the Global Science Panel home page.

March 2002: Wolfgang Lutz, Alexia Prskawetz, and Warren C. Sanderson (Eds.) 2002. Population and Environment: Methods of Analysis. A supplement to Vol. 28, 2002 of Population and Development Review.

How does the human population affect the natural environment and vice versa? Increasing research in this field calls for more appropriate analytical methods. In this first systematic treatment, the contributors — demographers, other social scientists, and environmental scientists — describe and critically examine key concepts and analytical approaches, both in theoretical terms and through examples and case studies. (Posted March 2002)

World Population Program Home Page

2001

The article on THE END OF WORLD POPULATION GROWTH that appeared in the 02 August 2001 issue of Nature has received wide press attention. Nature made the article its Featured Article of the week.
Population project leader Wolfgang Lutz and colleagues Warren Sanderson of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Sergei Scherbov of the University of Groningen find it highly probable that world population will reach a peak during this century and then start to decline. Over the coming decades ther

e will be a growing demographic divide. For many of today's poorest countries, population growth, reproductive health, and poverty will still be pressing issues. In more and more countries, including China, population aging will pose a major challenge. (posted August 2001). Nature 412: 543 - 545 (2001) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.: includes supplementary information, methods, and references, http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v412/n6846/full/412543a0_fs.html. IIASA Reprint Research Report (RR-01-012) can be ordered for a handling charge of US$12 at http://www.iiasa.ac.at/cgi-bin/pubsrch?RR01012

July 2001: Global Science Panel on Population and Environment:
IIASA, IUSSP and UNU have recently launched a Global Science Panel on Population and Environment to assess the role of the population variable in sustainable development and to build a bridge between the Rio and Cairo processes. Nafis Sadik and Maurice Strong serve as patrons of this panel, which held its first meeting at NIDI (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute) on July 16, 2001.
The panel will produce a policy statement for wide distribution in the preparatory process for the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development and hold a scientific meeting on Population in Sustainable Development at IIASA on March 21-23, 2002. (Posted July 31st, 2001.)

June 2001: Lutz, Wolfgang and Anne Goujon. 2001. The World's Changing Human Capital Stock: Multi-State Population Projection by Educational Attainment. In Population and Development Review 27(2):323-339, June 2001.

June 2001: Population is the focus of the newest Options magazine (pdf). In an interview, Program Leader Wolfgang Lutz discusses ongoing work toward a general concept of population balance, which combines concerns about population growth and population aging. You'll also find results of recent PDE (population-development-environment) case studies on Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique, based on extensive modeling of the sustainable development implications of HIV/AIDS, including consideration of the cost of AIDS medication. Also in this issue: summaries of the first global population projections by level of education.

Feb. 2001: CD-ROM / Website: AFRICA IN THE ERA OF HIV/AIDS: Botswana's Future, Mozambique's Future, Namibia's Future: Modeling Population and Sustainable Development - Challenges in the Era of HIV/AIDS.
Compiled by a research team lead by W. Lutz.

Publications Release, and visit the web version of the CD-ROM, www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/POP/pde/

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