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 agespecific human capital growth on economic growth and first results show-unlike earlier studies-a consistently positive effect.
When will least developed countries be most vulnerable to climate change, given the influence of projected socio-economic development? The question is important, not least because current levels of international assistance to support adaptation lag more than an order of magnitude below what analysts estimate to be needed, and scaling up support could take many years. In this paper, we examine this question using an empirically derived model of human losses to climate-related extreme events, as an indicator of vulnerability and the need for adaptation assistance. We develop a set of 50-year scenarios for these losses in one country, Mozambique, using high-resolution climate projections, and then extend the results to a sample of 23 least-developed countries. Our approach takes into account both potential changes in countries' exposure to climatic extreme events, and socio-economic development trends that influence countries' own adaptive capacities. Our results suggest that the effects of socio-economic development trends may begin to offset rising climate exposure in the second quarter of the century, and that it is in the period between now and then that vulnerability will rise most quickly. This implies an urgency to the need for international assistance to finance adaptation.vulnerability | adaptive capacity | development | natural disasters | natural hazards
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