Breaking the Waves? Education, Youth Bulges, and Armed Conflict

# _3.1 IIASA Human Capital Data_

Education data originate from a new dataset compiled by researchers at IIASA (Lutz et al. 2007). The dataset contains information from 120 countries for the 1970-2000 period, based on individual-level educational attainment data from Demographic Health Surveys and national censuses, back projected using multi-state demographic modeling. The dataset measures educational attainment as opposed to more commonly used education measures like educational spending or enrollment rates. It covers a great number of developing countries, including many countries with recent conflict experiences.

The IIASA data consists of population estimates by age, gender and highest educational attainment (4 categories: no schooling, some primary, completed lower secondary, completed tertiary), covering the period from 1970 to 2000, for 120 countries/territories (discrepancies between this figure and others below arise from the fact that more countries have been added since the publication of Lutz et al. (2007) and the introduction of splits and mergers during data matching). It is discussed in some detail here because of the novel methodology it is based on and the implications this has for the present analysis.

The dataset corrects a number of deficiencies of existing education statistics for this period that have to this date prevented the kind of analysis conducted in this study. The principal existing source for historical international education statistics has been UNESCO, which has been collating national education statistics since the 1960s. Unfortunately, this database suffers from at least four problems. Firstly, there are many gaps, reflecting years in which no statistics were provided by particular countries. Secondly, not all countries had the capacity to collect reliable data, especially in earlier years. Thirdly, the statistics are not fully consistent across countries due to different definitions. Fourthly they are not consistent over time, as definitions, incl. internationally agreed ones, such as the _International Standard Classification of Education_ (ISCED) categories, were modified at various points in time.

The IIASA dataset attempts to overcome these limitations by employing a novel methodology inspired by demographic methods to reconstruct historic attainment data from censuses performed around the year 2000. The central idea is that at any point in time, the education profile of the population reflects its educational history much like its age profile reflects past fertility and mortality. Since the highest education level is typically reached relatively early in life, it can be assumed that the 50-year olds with secondary education in 2000 come from exactly one population group in 1995, namely the 45-year olds with secondary education, rather than a mixture of these and 45-year olds in 1995 who graduated from secondary school between 1995 and 2000. This principle is refined by applying differential mortality rates to different educational attainment groups, by disaggregating the oldest age group and normalizing the figures to the known total population size known for any intermediate years. For a more detailed reference, see (Lutz et al., 2007).

The dataset produced by this method is by design complete in the sense that every combination of country and year within its scope contains a data entry; it can be considered more reliable in that data from recent census results can be assumed to be of higher quality than data collected twenty or thirty years ago, when many developing countries had lower statistical capacity; it is consistent across countries in that the census categories are mapped to the ISCED classification in creating the baseline data; and it is consistent over time in that the entire dataset is with 8