Using Future Age Profiles to Improve Immigration Projections
Young adults migrate more than elderly people. As populations in many origin countries get older, this may affect out-migration – and thus immigration to other countries. This is usually not taken into account in projections of future immigration, even though a marked ageing is expected to take place globally. We show how United Nations’ projections of future age profiles in origin countries can be combined with emigration rates by age groups to improve national projections of immigration to a destination country, exemplified by Norway. Using several methods for projecting future migration, our results show that projected immigration tends to decline when taking expected ageing in origin regions into account. Further, we demonstrate how such declines in projected immigration affect the projections for the total Norwegian population up to 2100. Our results suggest that by taking changing age profiles in origin regions into account in immigration projections, the projected population size in Norway would be reduced equivalent to that of reducing the fertility assumptions by 0.1 children per woman.
Funding
Statistics Norway
the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) through the Swedish Initiative for Research on Microdata in the Social and Medical Sciences (SIMSAM), grant number 340-2013-5164
History
ISSN
2002-617XOriginal title
Using Future Age Profiles to Improve Immigration ProjectionsOriginal language
- English