Reconstruction of populations by age, sex and level of educational attainment for 120 countries for 1970-2000

Using demographic multi-state methods for back projecting the populations of 120 countries by age, sex and level of educational attainment from 2000 to 1970 (covering 93 percent of the 2000 world population), this paper presents an ambitious effort to reconstruct human capital data which are essential for empirically studying the aggregate level returns to education. Unlike earlier reconstruction efforts, this new dataset jointly produced at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) gives the full educational attainment distributions for four categories (no education, primary, secondary and tertiary education) by five-year age groups and with definitions that are strictly comparable across time. Based on empirical distributions of educational attainment by age and sex for the year 2000, the method moves backward along cohort lines while explicitly considering the fact that men and women with different education have different levels of mortality. The resulting dataset will allow new estimates on the impact of age-specific human capital growth on economic growth and first results unlike earlier a consistently positive effect.

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