Population Futures for Europe: An Analysis of Alternative Scenarios

Wolf, D.A., Wils, A.B., Lutz, W. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7975-8145, & Scherbov, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0881-1073 (1988). Population Futures for Europe: An Analysis of Alternative Scenarios. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-88-046

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Abstract

Population projections using arbitrary assumptions are made by many agencies, national and international, and there is no obvious need for one more set. But what distinguishes the projections of this Working Paper is the extremely wide range of assumptions in regard to births, deaths and migration with which the authors experimented. Moreover, they give a more explicit rationale for their assumptions than is commonly presented.

In effect the paper answers such questions as "What if we have a new baby boom, short but intense, comparable to that of the 1950s?" "What if mortality improves spectacularly, not only at the ages to which people have lived up to now, but far beyond those ages, say though discovery of a magic drug?" On the other hand they also ask "What happens if some vast epidemic, such as AIDS, ravages the population of Europe?"

Its imaginative assumptions are unlikely to be fulfilled, but none of them is impossible. This new set of perspectives goes beyond the more conventional projections that are currently in print in displaying what may happen in the future.

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