Abstract
The process of progressive aging in many industrialized countries has caught the attention of demographers for many years. Their attempt has been to make planners and policy-makers aware of population concerns, including the impact of population dynamics on social expenditures, by using population projections as a basic tool. This is leading to a clear difference between conditional projections, which remain a very important interpretative tool from a scientific point of view, and unconditional projections, which aspire to be “real forecasts”.
After describing the main results of the recent Italian population projections, and some possible consequences the aging may have on social expenditures, this paper focuses on attempts to improve the accuracy of development assumptions, with special regard to natural components. Emphasis is placed on the importance of applying specific methodological tools to define self-explanatory assumptions for fertility and mortality and to produce projections which could be considered, with reasonable limitations, as real forecasts.
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