Probabilistic population projections for 27 EU Countries

Sergei Scherbov, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and Vienna Institute of Demography
Marija Mamolo, Vienna Institute of Demography

The paper focus on probabilistic population projections for 27 EU countries using the expert argument-based approach. Demographic data are derived from Eurostat. The baseline projection year is 2006. For each country the population by single year of age and sex is projected up to 2050. We establish that the Eurostat projection medium variant assumptions for fertility, mortality and migration represent the mean of the distribution of the future path of each demographic component. The low and the high variant assumptions on the future trend of fertility, mortality and net migration represent the lower and the upper bound of the area which covers a range of 90 percent of all the future cases. The age profile for fertility and migration is kept constant during the whole projection period. These probabilistic population projections are complementary to Eurostat population projections for the EU countries, since they provide a measure of uncertainty of the population projection outcome.