Disclaimer: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, changes to the course may be necessary at short notice.

If things go as anticipated, this is going to be a hands-on programming course with theoretical modules interspersed in between. Participants’ programming skills will be evaluated at the beginning of the course and depending on existing qualifications, the programming part will be conducted in Excel and VBA or R. Either way, participants will learn how to use basic and advanced spreadsheet/programming techniques to present and analyze demographic data.

More specifically, students will learn some of the key methodologies of population science to study the drivers of demographic change. They will embark on a journey to understand the evolution of populations and their human capital dynamics. We will define future scenarios to project populations forward along the basic dimensions of age and sex. Once this projection model has been explained in its details, we will explore the policy implications of different scenario assumptions.

1. Demographic country profile (30%); to be presented in class and submitted as a written report. Participants can choose any country except their country of origin. Each country can only be chosen by one participant. Depending on the number of participants, groups of up to three people may be possible.

2. Population projections by age and sex; to be submitted as either an executable R code or an Excel/VBA macro (50%). The goal of this task is to roughly replicate the results according to the UN World Population Prospects.

3. Classroom participation (20%).