DEMOquality SIGNED

Project "DEMOquality" data sheet

The following table provides information about the project.

 Partnership

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 Project objective

In the last decades, social inequalities within countries and the rise in socio-economic differences between European countries have been an increasing policy concern. Education plays a chief role as a resource to fight poverty and to ensure greater social and territorial cohesion, within and across countries, as recognised by the Europe 2020 strategy. Supporting individuals to achieve tertiary education is a necessary policy-target, however, in the long-term, it may not be sufficient to eradicate educational differences across countries. This is especially due to the links between differential demographic behaviours by educational groups and the intergenerational transmission of education. Keeping a comparative approach by country and sex, this project aims at highlighting macro-level consequences of the educational gradient in family formation processes and the transmission of tertiary education from one generation to the next one. To this end, I will use the most recent comparable cross-country individual survey-data (SHARE, GGS), and I will apply advanced statistical techniques (i.e., decomposition and simulation methods) that permit to reconcile micro-macro levels of analysis. This project emphasizes the fact that enacting family policies, which aim to flatten the educational gradient in demographic behaviour, is a possible way to reduce educational differences across European countries. Next, I also emphasize the bidirectional relationship between parent-children generations. On the one hand, I focus on the transmission of education from parents to children and, on the other hand, I refer to (potential) feedback effects of children’s education on parents’ survival. Overall, this project will uncover the connections between the fields of demography and social inequalities. Low fertility and higher life expectancy at older ages, which are the drivers of population ageing, are not necessarily bad outcomes when they may lead to a decrease in social inequalities.