Education, health and economic development

As one of the world's leading population experts, Wolfgang Lutz was invited to give a lecture  at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). This lecture entitled "Education, health and economic development" will take a demographic approach to this highly relevant topic. Demography studies the changing size and composition of the populations and in doing so multidimensional demography goes beyond the study of changing age structure and also includes the changing structures by education, labor force participation and other important individual characteristics.

The Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital has reconstructed to 1950 and forecast (under different scenarios) until  2100 the changing age and education composition for all countries in the world. In this context we will study under a global perspective the interactions between education, income growth and heath. New studies show that education is more important than income in driving increases in life expectancy. Education and health together are sometimes called human capital. And we will also discuss how human capital is not only the key driver for economic growth but also for sustainable human development in the broader sense.

Since 1984 at IIASA, Lutz has worked on family demography, fertility analysis, population projection, and the interaction between population and environment. Together with his colleagues at POP, he has been expanding demographic methods to make them more relevant for the analysis of contemporary global policy challenges. He is an advocate in promoting the crucial role of education for dealing with future challenges.

Recently IIASA published a report entitled "Demographic Scenarios for the EU" that was produced together with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) under the leadership of Lutz. It builds population scenarios to understand the long-term effects of changes in key migration trends, and whether undesirable consequences can be limited or counteracted. The work was conducted in the framework of the Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration (CEPAM) a collaboration between IIASA’s World Population Program and the JRC. 

Event details:

Date: 13 June 2019

Time: 3-5PM

Location: Moscow, Vernadsky Ave., 82, RANEPA, building 5, Hall of the Academic Council (5th floor), Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration

Contact: Sergey Shulgin

For more information in Russian, please visit the event website.

Last edited: 11 June 2019