Projecting Households under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways Using a Life Course Approach

Orlando Olaya Bucaro, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Samir KC, IIASA

The household is an important unit for analysis of greenhouse gas emission from the population. A large part of private consumption occurs at the household level such as housing, cars, household machines or even food. There are many different methods and approaches to project households however, there is a lack of household projections that connect with population projections commonly used in climate change research such as the Wittgenstein Center (WIC) projections that correspond to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Moreover, the WIC projections are by education in addition to age and sex. Basing the household projection on population projections with level of education allows us to infer additional life events that has an impact on household status transitions such as pursuing post-secondary education. Applying a life course approach to the household transitions trajectories lets us analyze how different life course events shape the likelihood of moving between different household types. Using Norway as a case study and Norwegian registry data we are expecting to find generalizable patterns of household formation across the population by age, sex and education that are changing by cohort. Further, by using Bayesian forecasting methods we can then make probabilistic estimates of the future household structure.

Keywords: Population projections, forecasts, and estimations, Families, Unions and Households, Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Population Ageing

See extended abstract.