Forecasting Net Migration By Age: The Flow-Difference Approach

Most population projection models require age-specific information on net migration totals as a key demographic component of population change. Existing methods for predicting future patterns of net migration by age have proven inadequate. The main reason is that methods applied to model net migration are unable to distinguish factors influencing the inflows from those influencing the outflows. In this paper, we develop two flow-difference methods to produce age-specific forecasts of net migration for counties in the Washington State. One uses a deterministic approach; the other uses a Bayesian approach and includes measures of uncertainty. Both methods model the age-specific flows of in-migration and out-migration to derive age-specific net migration. By including models for in-migration and out-migration, even in the absence of data on such flows, the resulting net migration predictions are greatly improved over existing methods that only model the net migration totals. The estimation intervals from the Bayesian flow-difference method are found to be well calibrated, while the other approaches do not yield such intervals. The implications for future county-level population projections in Washington State are shown.