Project: Bridging the micro-macro gap in population forecasting (MicMac) [concluded]

The objective of MicMac is to develop a demographic projection model that can be used in the context of the provision of high-quality and sustainable healthcare services and pension systems. It consists of a methodology and user-friendly software.

The sustainability of high-quality healthcare is influenced to a considerable extent by demographic change and by the way people live their lives (lifestyle and life course). Adequate monitoring and forecasting of demographic change and of lifestyles and life courses, therefore, is indispensable to the provision of health and social security to the people of Europe. Traditional cohort component models of population change omit intra-cohort variation. Members of a birth cohort, however, may differ in many ways. These differences are accounted for by dynamic (longitudinal) micro simulation models. MicMac bridges the micro-macro gap by approaching a birth cohort as being composed of individuals and by defining a set of common transition rates estimated conditionally on covariates. Cohort biographies are obtained in two ways: by applying cohort transition rates to a synthetic cohort (the output of Mac) and by aggregating individual biographies (the output of Mic).

MicMac is carried out by a consortium of research institutes led by NIDI and further consisting of the Vienna Institute for Demography (VID, Vienna), the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED, Paris), Bocconi University (BU, Milan), the Erasmus Medical Centre (EMC, Rotterdam), the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, (MPIDR, Rostock), the International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA, Laxenburg) and the University of Rostock (UROS, Rostock).

More information is available on the project website www.micmac-projections.org.