Historically, official Norwegian mortality projections computed by Statistics Norway have consistently under-predicted life expectancy. The projected age distribution of deaths may be used to check if the official mortality projections are plausible. The aim of the paper is to verify whether the...

We analyse empirical errors observed in historical population forecasts produced by statistical agencies in 14 European countries since 1950. The focus is on forecasts for three demographic variables: fertility (Total Fertility Rate - TFR), mortality (life expectancy at birth), and migration...

We present a probabilistic forecast for the immigrant population of Norway and their Norwegian-born children ("second generation") broken down by age, sex, and three types of country background: 1. West European countries plus the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; 2. East...

We compute a stochastic household forecast for the Netherlands by the random share method. Time series of shares of persons in nine household positions, broken down by sex and five-year age group for the years 1996-2010 are modelled by means of the Hyndman-Booth-Yasmeen product-ratio variant of...

When successive birth cohorts of women get their children at progressively lower ages, births that would have occurred during a certain period without changes in the timing, are now “squeezed” into a shorter period. This pushes period fertility up, and the period Total Fertility Rate (TFR)...

The Scaled Model of Error has gained considerable popularity during the past ten years as a device for computing probabilistic population forecasts of the cohort-component type. In this report we investigate how sensitive probabilistic population forecasts produced by means of the Scaled Model...

Nowadays, demographers, population statisticians, and population forecasters have richer data, more refined theories of demographic behavior, and more sophisticated methods of analysis than they had two or three decades ago. This scientific progress should have made it easier to predict...