South Africa's Uncertain Demographic Present and Future

South Africa faces tremendous demographic challenges, mostly related to HIV/AIDS. Any projection is even made more difficult through significant disagreements over current population size, age structure, fertility and mortality levels. This paper expands methods of expert-based probabilistic population projections to include uncertainty distributions about the current demographic conditions. The result is a probabilistic distribution of future population trends in South Africa combining uncertainty about present starting conditions and future rates. For 2030 the total population of South Africa is projected at 54 million (median) with the 95% uncertainty interval ranging from 36 to 74 million.

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