Estimating and Projecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Human Capital in Australia

Nicholas Biddle, Australian National University

Public policy in Australia has historically failed to provide the supports and infrastructure for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population to engage in formal education in a way which meets their needs and aspirations. This includes early childhood, school, and postschool education. For this reason, human capital development has been less than equitable, leading to worse outcomes by standard measures (income, employment, and health) and also by Indigenous-specific measures that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have cause to value (including access to land, language, and culture). Over recent years, there has been substantial improvement in the level of education completion for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, although the measurement of this change is complicated by changing patterns of identification and location. The aim of this paper is to use publicly available data to measure the level of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander human capital and document how it is changing through time. The process of this measurement involves estimating the level of education, calculating the economic and other returns to that education, and then projecting the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population through time under different population and human capital scenarios.

Keywords: The Demography of Indigenous Populations, Census data, Population projections, forecasts, and estimations

See extended abstract.