Work Session on Demographic Projections

Jakub Bijak contributed a presentation on uncertainty in international migration forecasts while Guy Abel discussed his work on Bayesian methods for population forecasting. They are both members of the modelling stand of the ESRC Centre for Population Change.

The Work Session was organised jointly by Eurostat and the UNECE to bring together policy makers, academics, demographic researchers from the National Statistical Institutes and other national and international organisations as well as other producers and users of population projections. Given such varied audience, it is especially noteworthy that the approaches proposed by the CPC team were subsequently remarked upon in the round table discussion, as well as in the following recommendations for future work, as 'very promising for demographic forecasting in general'. It was noted that 'Combining quantitative data, expert knowledge and demographic theories by the means of Bayesian statistics, whilst also involving forecast users in the forecasting process to a greater extent, seem to be a very promising way of obtaining not only more realistic, but also more useful predictions'.