A new effort to reconstruct the population by age, sex and level of education for all countries since 1970

Samir KC, IIASA
Anne Goujon, Vienna Institute of Demography and International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Wolfgang Lutz, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

Information on the population by level of educational attainment and its changes over time has been collected for many decades. However, the data across countries and time is hardly usable because of different categorization. Most efforts at compiling systematic time series data on educational attainment (e.g Barro and Lee) provide data on educational attainment by sex for the population above age 15 or 25, i.e. ignoring one important dimension, which is the age structure. This new methodology proposes to reconstruct data on educational attainment by age, and sex for all countries where data is available for the year 2000 by using demographic back projection methods for the period 1970-2000.The methodology of backward projections is based on the principle of back-projecting age-specific proportions of educational attainment along cohort lines, adjusting them for education-specific mortality and migration. We will present the methodology as well as results for a large number of countries.