Nicholas Gailey wird für sein Dissertationsprojekt Human capital and demographic futures: Challenges of population aging, depopulation, and brain drain in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus ausgezeichnet.
Developed societies now universally face advanced population aging, with a growing contingent also encountering depopulation. Eastern Europe and the Caucasus are challenged by a third factor, “brain drain”, as its talent is drawn west for work. In light of these trends, the doctoral project explores: 1) how migration and fertility impact human capital in these regions, and 2) the extent to which the current demographic trajectories pose a problem for productivity and a potential overgrowth in non-workers relative to workers.
Population projections by age, sex, and education – including scenarios based on new policy goals – serve as an important tool for testing the momentum behind demographic trends. Specific policy-oriented targets, such as helping couples to achieve their desired fertility or moderating brain drain, are examined to show the range of potential change by 2050, focusing especially on Armenia, Georgia, North Macedonia, Romania, and Ukraine. Generally, populations continue to age regardless of any plausible interventions, while the future accumulation of human capital is more alterable. Human capital is a critical factor not only for general socio-economic development, but also specifically for adapting to the unfolding demographic changes in motion.
The doctoral project also gives special attention to the South Caucasian countries of Armenia and Georgia to advance emerging challenges to the conventional age-based dependency ratio – a measure of the balance between the productive and dependent proportions of the population. More complex measures of dependency are calculated using data on labor force participation, income by education, tested literacy scores, skill mismatches, and other dimensions to give a more realistic view of dependency. The findings show how dependency burdens do not deteriorate nearly as dramatically as implied by the solely age-based measures. Furthermore, contrary to policy efforts preoccupied with population size alone, the work highlights developing human capital – quality, not quantity of the labor force – as a promising strategy for managing the effects of population aging and decline.
Nicholas Gailey hat 2015 das Bachelorstudium an der University of California, Berkeley abgeschlossen und seinen Masterabschluss in den Fächern Kommunikation und Journalismus an der Stanford University (2017) erhalten. Seit 2018 arbeitet er am Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital für die zwei Mitgliedsorganisationen International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) und das Institut für Demographie der Universität Wien. Zudem hat er an mehreren Projekten für die Europäische Kommission, die Weltbank, das UNDP-Serbien, UNFPA-Armenien, die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) mitgewirkt. Der Schwerpunkt lag auf der Alterung der Bevölkerung, der Migration und der Abhängigkeitslast in Europa und in den benachbarten Regionen. Seine Arbeiten sind in renommierten Zeitungen erschienen: Foreign Policy, Der Spiegel, Le Monde und Euractiv. Seit 2020 ist Nicholas Gailey Dissertant an der Universität Wien.