Global and National Demographic Forecasting Under Structural Uncertainty: Demographic Memory and Agent-Based Models – Paperback

This book examines the challenges facing long-term demographic forecasts in an era of structural change. It explains how changes in demographic persistence, rising behavioral heterogeneity, and growing volatility can weaken the stability of fertility, mortality, and migration mechanisms, and thereby narrow the horizon over which projections can be trusted. Building on leading international projection frameworks, the book clarifies the difference between relatively robust short- and medium-term forecasts and long-run projections that are sensitive to structural breaks and nonlinear dynamics.

A distinctive contribution is the use of autocorrelation analysis as a diagnostic tool for examining demographic memory. By comparing autocorrelation structures of fertility, life expectancy, and net migration across countries, historical periods, and time lags, the book identifies varied patterns of statistical dependence and discusses their implications for the assumptions underlying extrapolation. Autocorrelation is used not to produce forecasts, but to assess linear dependence on past indicator values as one observable component of demographic memory.

The book also introduces agent-based models as a complementary framework for scenario analysis and stress-testing. ABM enables explicit representation of individual heterogeneity, adaptive behavior, and interaction effects that aggregate models often compress. Previously published modeling experiments provide retrospective illustrations of the proposed approach. Rather than proposing a single “best” long-term forecast, the book develops uncertainty-aware methods to interpret projections and explore alternative demographic futures.

Intended for demographers, population forecasters, economists, and computational social scientists, the volume provides a clear, methodologically grounded perspective on the limits of prediction and on practical tools for analysis under uncertainty.