Latvia: back in 2002 the UN almost hit the 2023 population — its errors cancelled out
Projected 1.9M; the UN now estimates 1.88M, just 0.9% off. The bars show the errors that offset one another.
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A population projection is built from four parts: how many people live there at the start, how many will be born, how many will die and how many more will arrive than leave. The UN has since estimated each part anew, which shows where the projection went wrong. Here the total came out almost right, while the parts missed in opposite directions. 72.7k more babies were born than expected; migration took away 71.9k more people; 12.8k more people died.
A bar is how much one part moved the total against the projection: right means more people than projected, left means fewer; the number is the size of the move. More births and fewer deaths add people; fewer births and more deaths take them away. “2000 population higher / lower”: the UN later estimated the population the projection started from differently from what it assumed then. The last bar is the total; the parts add up to it within a small residual.
- UN 2002 projection for 2023
1.9M
- UN 2024 estimate
1.88M
- Population in 2000: in the projection → estimated now
2.37M → 2.37M
- Births 2000–2023: assumed → estimated now
400k → 473k
- Deaths 2000–2023: assumed → estimated now
690k → 703k
- Net migration 2000–2023, arrivals minus departures: assumed → estimated now
−184k → −256k
- Residual of the calculation
−0.6k
The UN 2002 projection for 2023 against the UN 2024 estimate. The gap is split along the population balance: the 2000 population (estimated now minus the one the projection started from), then births, deaths and net migration over 2000–2023 (estimated now minus assumed; for deaths the other way round, since more deaths mean fewer people). Residual −0.6k: rounding and the five-year periods of older projections. Chosen: a projection of at least 8 years whose total was off by at most 1.5% while its parts missed in opposite directions, one of them by over 2% of the population.
Both the projection and the current figure are UN estimates: in countries without full registration of births and deaths they come from a model, not a count.
A question for this picture
Did the projection understand how the population changes, or merely land on a similar total?