Population Estimates and Projections
Population estimates are usually derived from census and other administrative data. Population estimates are normally produced after the date the estimate is for.
Some estimates, such as the Usually resident population estimate who usually lives in a locality as at the census date, even though the census did not count them within that locality. Census questions usually include a questions about where a person usually lives, whether they are a resident or visitor, or also live somewhere else, to allow these estimates to be made.
Other estimates are concerned with estimating population on a particular date that is different to the census date, for example the middle or end of a calendar or financial year. These estimates often use birth and death records and migration data to adjust census counts for the changes that have happened since the census.
Population projections are produced in advance of the date they are for. They use time series analysis of existing census data and other sources of population information to forecast the size of future populations. Because there are unknown factors that may affect future population changes, population projections often incorporate high and low as well as expected values for future populations. Population projections are often recomputed after a census has been conducted.
Read more about this topic: Population Statistics
Famous quotes containing the words population, estimates and/or projections:
“The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)