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Methodology maintained by Elie Habib, founder of World Monitor. Published revisions are recorded in the corrections log.

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This answers a question that sounds simple and usually is not: does this country have the people to do the work? “The people” breaks into three separate things, and a country can be strong in one and hollow in another:
  1. Enough working-age people — now, and still in ten years’ time.
  2. A pipeline producing skills — universities, STEM graduates, researchers.
  3. A workforce that can actually build things — trained industrial trades, machine operators, manufacturing employment.
A country with a young population and no engineers is not the same as one with world-class universities and a workforce retiring faster than it can be replaced. Both look mediocre in a single blended number, which is exactly why this is not published as one.
Do not average the three groups together. They come from different sources on different clocks. A country whose industrial-workforce figure is eight years old and whose age structure is current does not have an eight-year-old demographic profile — it has two observations that must be read separately. The response keeps them apart on purpose.
Access. Served from GET /api/resilience/v1/get-demographics-capability?countryCode=<ISO2> and MCP get_demographics_capability. Both require a Pro subscription.

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Three independent groups

The response is deliberately not a single blended index. Each group resolves on its own, from its own source, on its own clock.

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Age structure — UN World Population Prospects

medianAgeYears, workingAgePopulationPeople, oldAgeDependencyRatioPercent, totalDependencyRatioPercent, and a forward workingAgePopulationProjected10yPeople. WPP publishes revisions every two years; between revisions the projection is the same series, not a fresh estimate.

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Education pipeline — UNESCO UIS and World Bank WDI

tertiaryEnrollmentGrossPercent, stemGraduatesSharePercent, and researchersPerMillion. UIS is primary; WDI fills where UIS coverage lapses. Reporting lag is long — three to five years is ordinary, not a fault.

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Industrial workforce — ILOSTAT

manufacturingEmploymentSharePercent, trainedIndustrialWorkforcePeople, craftTradesEmploymentPeople, and plantMachineOperatorsEmploymentPeople. ILOSTAT coverage is the thinnest of the three: a country can have current WPP age structure and no usable ILOSTAT observation at all.

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Reading the response

Every metric carries its value, year, source, unit, and an explicit available flag. An optional sourceStatus preserves supplied provider status metadata. Read available before the value. An absent proto3 number serializes as 0. A supplied zero with available: true remains a valid value. Availability does not establish that the value is observed or unestimated. Read source status separately. ILOSTAT statuses such as Imputation, Estimate, and Adjusted come from its official status code list. World Bank forecast status comes from its API observation-status metadata. Notes for sums and ratios identify their input statuses. If any input status is missing, the note includes Not supplied. When no status is supplied, the display says Estimate and imputation status not supplied. A modelled source name alone does not identify which individual values were imputed. Available observations in older snapshots without sourceStatus show the same missing-status disclosure until a source refresh supplies status metadata. Do not average across groups. They have different vintages and different coverage. A country whose ILOSTAT row is eight years old and whose WPP row is current does not have an eight-year-old demographic profile; it has two observations that must be read separately. The response keeps them apart for that reason. Retention lives on stages[].status, not on each value. A stage is fresh, retained, or unavailable. retained means that source group was carried forward from a previous fetch because the current upstream request failed. Individual observations have no retained field. The top-level available: false means no group resolved at all — the country has no usable observation in any of the three, which is different from a country whose groups each carry their own partial availability.

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Cadence

The seeder refreshes on the slowest useful cycle for the set. Upstream publication is the binding constraint: WPP every two years, UIS and WDI annually with multi-year lag, ILOSTAT irregularly by country.