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The Limits of Population Forecasting
Abstract
The user of forecasts needs to know how far published estimates of future population can be relied on. The most compact way of describing accuracy is by showing the average error of past forecasts. From over a thousand comparisons of forecast with realization--nationalregional and global and covering the past 30 years--the conclusion emerges that the odds are two to one that a forecast rate of increase [plus or minus] 0.4 percentage points will straddle the realized rate of increase over future periods. That means in practice useable forecasts for the next 5 to 20 years virtually no information on the population 100 years hence. (summary in FRE SPA)
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Citations
Cited by
Bocquier, P. (2005) · Demographic Research · doi:10.4054/demres.2005.12.9 · Cited by 1,746
Bayesian probabilistic population projections for all countries
Raftery, A. E., Li, N., Ševčíková, H., Gerland, P., & Heilig, G. K. (2012) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1211452109 · Cited by 298
Probabilistic projections of the total fertility rate for all countries
Alkema, L., Raftery, A. E., Gerland, P., Clark, S. J., Pelletier, F., Buettner, T., & Heilig, G. K. (2011) · Demography · doi:10.1007/s13524-011-0040-5 · Cited by 248
A Perspective on Long-Term Population Growth
Demeny, P. (1984) · Population and Development Review · doi:10.2307/1973168 · Cited by 31
Metadata
- Authors
- Keyfitz, N.
- Venue
- Population and Development Review
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1981-12
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 579
- ISSN
- 0098-7921 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2021009555
- Cited by
- 297
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 26.33
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Keyfitz, N. (1981). The Limits of Population Forecasting. Population and Development Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/1972799
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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