The total size of the world population is likely to increase from its current 7 billion to 8-10 billion by 2050. This uncertainty is because of unknown future fertility and mortality trends in different parts of the world. But the young age structure of the population and the fact that in much of Africa and Western Asia, fertility is still very high makes an increase by at least one more billion almost certain. Virtually, all the increase will happen in the developing world. For the second half of the century, population stabilization and the onset of a decline are likely. In addition to the future size of the population, its distribution by age, sex, level of educational attainment and place of residence are of specific importance for studying future food security. The paper provides a detailed discussion of different relevant dimensions in population projections and an evaluation of the methods and assumptions used in current global population projections and in particular those produced by the United Nations and by IIASA.

This thesis focuses on deaf people’s educational attainment, position on the labour market and sources of revenue. These issues are interrelated, for instance a higher level of educational attainment seems to be associated with a lower unemployment rate and higher levels of income. The national context is Sweden and the Swedish welfare state in 2005. All studies in the thesis compare a deaf population, consisting of 2,144 persons born between 1941 and 1980 who have attended a school for the deaf in Sweden, with a general reference population, consisting of 100,000 randomly chosen persons from the total Swedish population born between 1941 and 1980. Data for all studies consisted of registered information about the persons in the year 2005. The results show that there are differences between the deaf and the reference population regarding level of educational attainment, position on the labour market and sources of revenue and disposable income, with the deaf population having a poorer position than the reference population in all areas. There are also differences between the workplaces of the deaf and the people in the reference population, and it is twice as common for people in the deaf population than for people in the reference population to have a higher level of educational attainment than is required for their occupation. These differences between the deaf and the reference population cannot be associated with differences in the independent factors, as for instance sex, age and immigration background, for which the results have been adjusted. This thesis shows that being part of the deaf population appears to be of importance. Factors in conjunction with deafness that can increase our understanding of the differences between the deaf and the reference populations in an educational context, labour market context and economic context are discussed in the thesis.