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Old Posted Feb 25, 2009, 1:10 PM
New Brisavoine New Brisavoine is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bergenser View Post
It's not "true" or "untrue", it's a projection, a guess, an estimate, neither fact or fiction. We will have to see.
It's anything but a guess. It's a calculation by these statistical offices based on the shape of the age pyramid and the population momentum. Population is like a big steam ship, it can change course, but only very slowly, due to its inherent momentum and the shape of its age pyramid. That's why it is possible to make projections over a few decades (which would be totally impossible with, say, the economy, which can change course radically over just a few years). The only variable that can swing a lot is immigration, but they have made different projections based on different net migration assumption, and like I've already said, it would take a very high sustained net migration in Germany, and a very low net migration in France to have Germany with a larger population than France in 2050. Not totally impossible, but not very realistic (why would France and Germany, with no border between them, and coupled economies, have such strikingly diverging migration patterns over 41 years?).
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