Workshop on probabilistic projection and micro-simulation methodologies for demographic, family and related issues.

• Author: Templeton, Robert

The somewhat imposing title of this workshop (held on 6-8 December 2004 at Waikato University) may cause some readers to turn very quickly to the next item in this journal. To be fair, some of the sessions were indeed quite technical. However, the focus of the workshop and the fundamental themes of the research discussed embraced the basic knowledge upon which much social policy is founded--namely, the size of the New Zealand population, its composition in terms of age, gender and geographical distribution, and how these are likely to change in the near and distant future.

I suspect these data are amongst the key parameters that underpin our understanding of the implications of social policy changes in many sectors (e.g. education, labour market, health). In addition, projections of population sizes are used at different phases of social policy development, helping to set social policy objectives, providing inputs into planning for services and interventions, and providing benchmarks for monitoring and evaluation purposes. So it seems hard to argue that the development of exciting new methodologies in this area does not warrant some attention.

This workshop was an opportunity for many of the leading exponents in these fields to get together and expose these new ideas to key senior policy analysts in New Zealand, and discuss the implications of the new methodologies for New Zealand's population projections.

Key speakers included Dr Heather Booth (Australia National University), Dr John Bryant (Mahidol University Thailand), Professor Nico Keilman (University of Oslo), Dr Michael Rendall (RAND Corporation, United States, and Office of National Statistics, United Kingdom), Professor Shripad Tuljapurkar (Stanford University), Professor Frans Willekens (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute) and Dr Tom Wilson (University of Queensland). In addition, there were panel discussions featuring senior officials from Statistics New Zealand, the Treasury, the Ministry of Social Development, Te Puni Kokiri and the Ministry of Economic Development.

It is my intention in this review to provide my own "stumbling novice's" introduction to two of the central topics that were discussed, in the hope that these few paragraphs might provide readers with enough of a taste of the work for them to venture forth and read the experts' papers prepared for the workshop when they appear in the New Zealand Population Review in the near future.

The first broad...