Demographic Bulletin No. 63. Latin América: Projection of urban-rural population 1970 - 2025

Introducción

The present publication updates the information presented in issue No. 56 of the Demographic Bulletin (July 1995) based on revised projections for many countries and recent urban and rural population data from the 1990s census round.

The projections published here for the urban and rural populations, by sex and five-year age group, for 1970-2025 were processed by CELADE, except in the cases of Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru and Uruguay, for which the projections were prepared by national institutions with the assistance of CELADE - Population Division.

In the preparation of these projections, information from the latest censuses was compared with projections computed on the basis of previous censuses using the method proposed in "Metodología de las proyecciones de población urbana-rural y de población económicamente activa elaboradas en CELADE", Pujol, J. M. and J. Chackiel, in Métodos para proyecciones demográficas (CELADE, 1984). The comparison demonstrated these projections corresponded quite closely to the census results.

Consequently, the method used by CELADE on previous occasions, which is based on percentage breakdowns of the total urban population by sex and age group calculated using population census data, was employed for this issue of the Bulletin as well. This methodology projects the percentages of the total urban population by sex using a logistic curve with four parameters: two "observed" values (corresponding to the last two censuses in most cases), and a lower and upper asymptote. The procedure also assumes that the percentage breakdown of the urban population by age follows a logistic pattern similar to that of the total. Then, in order to obtain the corresponding population values, these percentages are applied to the population breakdowns by sex and age obtained from the national projections in use in the countries (Demographic Bulletin, No. 62).