ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comprehensive assessment of what we can assume today about likely future demographic trends in all Asian countries. It starts with some general considerations about the production of assumptions in population projections, looks at past population projections for the region and assesses their performance in retrospect. Next, the substantive basis for assumptions about future fertility, mortality and migration trends in Asia are discussed, drawing on the research presented in World Population and Human Capital in the twenty-first century (Lutz, Butz and KC 2014 ). It concludes with presenting the medium projections and some alternative scenarios for the region as a whole and for all individual countries. The scenarios follow the narratives of the so-called shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), which are widely used in the environmental change research community. According to the medium scenario (SSP2), Asia’s total population will peak around mid-century at a population of 5.1–5.2 billion and decline thereafter reaching around 4.4 billion by the end of the century.
