| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 統計研究所 === 101 === Due to the rapid mortality reduction, prolonging human longevity is a common phenomenon and longevity risk receives more attention in 21st century. Many developed countries encounter many problems brought up by prolonging life, such as poor community infrastructure and insufficient financial pension funds for the elderly. Population Projection thus becomes essential in government planning in dealing with the population aging. However, rapid changes in mortality and fertility make the projection very tricky. It would be even more difficult to project areas with fewer populations (i.e., small areas) since it takes extra efforts to deal with the larger fluctuations in small population.
The objective of the study is to construct a standard operating procedure (SOP) for small population projection. Unlike the previous study, e.g., Wang et al. (2012), we will take both the fertility and mortality into account (but set migration aside for simplicity). First, for the fertility projection, we evaluate if total fertility rates (TFR) are more appropriate than the age-specific fertility rates for small population. Also, we compare two fertility projection methods: Lee-Carter model and block bootstrap, and check which shows better results. Based on the computer simulation, we found that TFR performs better and the block bootstrap method is more sensitive to rapid fertility changes. As for mortality rate projection, we also recommend the standard operating procedure by Wang et al. (2012). However, the smoothing methods have limited impacts on mortality projection and can be ignored.
In addition to simulation, we also apply the SOP for projecting the small population to Taiwan counties and it achieves satisfactory results. However, due to the availability of data, our method can only be used for short-term projection (at most 30 years) and these results might not apply to long-term projection. Also, similar to the previous work, the fertility rates have the larger impact on small population projection, although we think that the migration has large impact as well. In this study, only the stochastic projection is considered and we shall consider including expert opinions as the future study.
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