Demographic heterogeneity and uncertainty in population projections

Recent developments in a class of stochastic population processes were used to study the impact of demographic heterogeneity on the uncertainty of population projections. Selected for study by computer simulation were population projections for East Africa designed to quantify opinions regarding expected fertility and mortality declines. Since both fertility and mortality declined in these projections, their laws of evolution may be described as time inhomogeneous. The computer simulation studies reported in this paper strongly suggest that randomized laws of evolution should be taken into account in further developments of population projection methodologies designed formally and computationally to accommodate uncertainty. Variability in fecundability, the kind of demographic heterogeneity studied in this paper, is only one aspect of these randomized laws.