The Geography of Future Human Capital in Europe: Regional Dynamics of Education and Aging

Tamburini, A. (2026). The Geography of Future Human Capital in Europe: Regional Dynamics of Education and Aging. IIASA Working Paper. Laxenburg, Austria: WP-26-004

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Abstract

The study of human capital formation and accumulation at the subnational level, including in the European context, has remained largely confined to historical and descriptive analyses rather than forward-looking projections. Spatially explicit projections of human capital, understood as the joint product of demographic structure (age and sex composition) and educational attainment, thus remain largely unavailable. This paper addresses this gap by developing a Bayesian time series model to project educational attainment across European NUTS-2 regions under the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The model works in log-return space, leverages the compositional nature of educational attainment distributions, and combines Bayesian uncertainty quantification with Iterative Proportional Fitting to ensure consistency with national SSP projections and regional demographic structures. The resulting dataset covers 215 NUTS-2 regions across 21 European countries, including three adult age groups from age 25 onwards and three education categories, spanning 2025 to 2100. The projections show a widespread yet heterogeneous increase in tertiary educational attainment, confirming convergence trends noted in existing literature, while the model also reveals that educational expansion unfolds at markedly different paces across regions, including within the same country, and a consistent female advantage across age groups and time horizons. Across European regions, the interplay between educational expansion and population ageing gives rise to diversified dynamics: rising attainment rates can coexist with a shrinking number of highly educated young adults where younger cohorts decline, while the gradual entry of more educated cohorts into older age groups reshapes the size and educational profile of the elderly population, with these processes often unfolding quite differently across regions within the same country.

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