On Forecasting Urban and Rural Populations: Some Methodological Reflections

Sheppard, E. (1983). On Forecasting Urban and Rural Populations: Some Methodological Reflections. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-83-032

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Abstract

Most attempts to forecast the proportions of a population that will be living in urban and rural areas use a model forecasting shifts between two homogeneous states: rural and urban (Ledent, 1980; United Nations, 1980). The aim of this short paper is to attempt to estimate how such forecasts must be corrected to account for the full complexity of a multiregional system, and to allow transitions from rural to urban areas over time. Purely demographic discrete time forecasts from an initial period T to some future period T, will be considered, and the effects of age distributions on migration and fertility rates will be neglected. Instead, attention will be focused on an issue emphasized elsewhere (Sheppard, 1980); that the dynamics of urbanization cannot be fully understood or predicted without allowing for the interdependencies between the various types of urban and rural areas; that is the full geography of population change. By introducing a methodology to correct forecasts in a way that allows for this, the importance of this full specification may be estimated.

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