Populations for 171 Countries by Age, Sex, and Level of Education around 2010: Harmonized Estimates of the Baseline Data for the Wittgenstein Centre Projections

Data series on levels of educational attainment of the adult population consistent across time and space cannot be found as such, readily available, not in an aggregated form and not by age and sex. This is a pity because levels of educational attainment of the working age population are the main component of human capital that is used in many models, mostly related to economics, IT and health. Researchers at IIASA have developed a methodology to reconstruct and project levels of educational attainment (see Lutz et al. 2007) based on the information contained in the best source for the most recent year. An improved and increased version will become available in 2013. We are showing in this paper that it does not really make sense to keep the data as close as possible to those directly available datasets since a large majority of those suffer from severe flaws, hampering any trend and regression analysis on levels of educational attainment. We show how picking the right dataset for the starting year can be a real hassle and point towards the necessity to invest in harmonizing and mapping levels of education to facilitate academic research for the benefit of societies