Demography

Wolfgang Lutz is one of the world`s foremost population scientists. His research interests centre mainly on methods in demography, population forecasts, world population developments, comparative European demography, demography in developing countries, the development of education and human capital as well as the future of birth rate developments. Lutz`s research has contributed to ground-breaking achievements in the analysis of population developments, including empirical analyses of birth rates, forecasting models for population development, and studies dealing with the relationship between developments in population and the environment. Most recently, Lutz has begun to focus more on the analysis of human capital and economic development. In an empirical comparison of 120 countries, Lutz was able to demonstrate that the central driver of wealth in societies is not necessarily elite education, but education for broad parts of the population. Using the funds from his Wittgenstein Award, Lutz aims to deepen these insights on the links between population development and education, health, sustainable development and wealth with a view to establishing these efforts as a new field of research. With the Wittgenstein endowment, Lutz plans to establish the "Research Center for International Human Capital," which will also be supported by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Vienna University of Economics and Business in close cooperation with the IIASA in Laxenburg, Austria. Lutz`s objective is to provide first-rate research conditions for highly interdisciplinary population and economics researchers and thus to establish one of the world`s leading research centres in this field. The research conducted at this new centre will make it possible to articulate new visions and policy approaches for some of the greatest challenges faced by societies today.

This project brings together the capabilities of three research institutions in the Vienna area to strengthen an exciting new field of research and make Vienna its global leader. The focus lies on the development and application of advanced multi-dimensional demographic methods to the analysis of the changing composition of populations with respect to its people-based productive potentials, something that economists call human capital. It primarily studies the changing number of people by their age and level of education, but also with respect to health, labour force participation and other individual characteristics that contribute to productive potential and social development. Institutionally, the Wittgenstein Centre (WIC) brings together three very different institutions: The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) was established in 1972 as the world centre for global modelling and was the only place where leading scientists from east and west of the Iron Curtain could work together. It was the birth place of the methods of multi-state demographic modelling. The PI has been leader of this program since 1994. The Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) has for the past forty years been the leading national research institute in the field of demography in Austria; after a significant expansion and internationalisation since 2002 (under the leadership of the PI) it has become one of the leading centres for comparative European demographic analysis. Finally, the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU, where the PI has been professor since 2008) established a demography group and serves as the university link. The innovative research of the WIC has already resulted in a number of far-reaching and highly policy relevant scientific insights which have been published in the top interdisciplinary journals. For example, it has been shown, through the reconstruction and analysis of changing educational attainment by age cohorts, that indeed human capital is the key driver of poverty eradication and economic growth. WIC has contributed to developing the human core of the globally used set of SSP (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) scenarios to study the impacts of climate change and shown that education is a key determinant of adaptive capacity. With respect to migration, the question Does Europe need more migrants for demographic reasons? has given new answers showing the crucial importance of labour force participation rates. Moreover, with respect to improving health it has been shown that education matters more than income, i.e. mind matters more than money. WIC has also been highly successful in acquiring competitive research funding. Amongst others, it has so far received eight ERC grants. It also had major impacts in outreach and science-policy communication to the highest levels of the European Commission (in the field of migration), and the United Nations (where the PI has been appointed by the UN Secretary General to serve as an author of the Global Sustainable Development Report to be presented to the worlds heads of state and government at the General Assembly in 2019).