Forecasting the Italian population: a stochastic approach

Even though demographers have some expectations about future population trends, the picture remains uncertain. In the stochastic approach implemented in this work, the uncertainty of the future population forecast has been quantified by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Predictive intervals were computed specifying the probability that the future population will lie between a certain range. We observed that it is very likely that the population of Italy will decline in the future and that population aging is inevitable. Our results thus demonstrate that in the long run, the current level of net migration does not provide a solution for the population decline and the re-equilibrium of the Italian age structure.