Overview

This website presents the 2023 revision of the Wittgenstein Centre population projections (Version 3.3), following the initial projections (Version 1) in 2013 (Lutz, Butz, and KC (Eds.) 2014) and the 2018 update (Version 2) (Lutz, Goujon, KC, Stonawski, and, Stilianakis (Eds.) 2018). Further details on the updates and the revisions can be found in K.C. et al. (2024) and in other satellite papers focusing on the migration component (Yildiz and Abel 2024), the mortality component (Dhakad and KC 2024). Visit here for details.

In 2021, the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenario community related to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change requested an update of the human core of the SSPs, which is at the origin of this version. This updated version is based on 2020 as the reference year, with adjustments to certain short-term assumptions extending to 2030. However, most long-term assumptions have not been changed. Several changes were nevertheless implemented, particularly in estimating and using country-specific education differentials in mortality and migration.

This new version includes population projections by levels of educational attainment from 2020 to 2100 for 200 countries according to seven scenarios (SSP1-5, SSP2-Zero Migration and SSP2-Double Migration). The reconstruction of past data will be available in the coming months.

Citation

The suggested citation for data and plots from this website is:

K.C., S., Dhakad, M., Potancokova, M., Adhikari, S., Yildiz, D., Mamolo, M., Sobotka, T., Zeman, K., Abel, G., Lutz, W., and Goujon, A. (2024). Updating the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) Global Population and Human Capital Projections. IIASA Working Paper. Laxenburg, Austria: WP-24-003. https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/19487. Available at: http://www.wittgensteincentre.org/dataexplorer.

Zenodo Repository

Find output files from the projection runs here (https://zenodo.org/records/14718294).

R package

You may download data directly into using the wcde package. See the package website for further details.

Credits

Data Explorer Team at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital:

Concept and Coordination:

• Guy J. Abel

• Dilek Yildiz

• Anne Goujon

Data:

• Samir K.C.

Web Interface:

• Guy J. Abel

• Bernhard Rengs

Collaborators:

Researchers who participated in the development of the projections:

²⁴: Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital

Software

Web interface built using:

• shiny: Chang, W., Cheng J., Allaire, J.J., Xie, Y. & McPherson, J. (2018). shiny: Web Application Framework for R. R package version 1.1.0

Additional R packages used for data manipulations and visualisation:

• tidyverse: Wickham H, Averick M, Bryan J, Chang W, McGowan LD, François R, Grolemund G, Hayes A, Henry L, Hester J, Kuhn M, Pedersen TL, Miller E, Bache SM, Müller K, Ooms J, Robinson D, Seidel DP, Spinu V, Takahashi K, Vaughan D, Wilke C, Woo K, Yutani H (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686. doi:10.21105/joss.01686.
• googleVis: Gesmann, M., & de Castillo, D. (2011). Using the Google visualisation API with R. The R Journal, 3(2), 40-44.
• webshot: Chang, W. (2017). webshot: Take Screenshots of Web Pages. R package version 0.5