Modern approaches to forecasting fertility

Abstract

The article presents an analytical review of approaches to birth forecasting developed in recent decades and actively used in practice. The approaches are divided into four classes: extrapolation, interpolation, based on the theory of reproductive behavior and multicausal. Among the extrapolation approaches, special attention is paid to Lee, Hyndman and Ullah models, which are representing a variety of time series models. We analyze the use of such functions of age-specific fertility distribution as the functions of Coale-Trussel, Hadwiger, beta- and gamma-distributions, double exponential Rogers function, polynomial models or spline functions (for example, the square spline function of Schmertmann), Pearson's curve of the first type. These models differ in the number of parameters and their demographic interpretability.