Fertility scenarios for high fertility countries in the IIASA/Oxford education projections

For the new round of IIASA/Oxford education projections, we present a new fertility scenario making process that attempts to overcome limitations of regular assumption making. Firstly, we include a large number of international experts to feed into the scenario making process by answering a questionnaire to identify main drivers of fertility, and secondly, a group of meta-expert evaluates results from the questionnaire. The construction of the scenarios consists of a three staged modeling approach. First, we estimate a model, using a country’s level and decrease of fertility during the past five-year period and compare it to countries with similar characteristics since 1970. Second, we estimate expected decrease of fertility by employing information, gathered from the fertility questionnaire. And third, numerical point estimates, supplied by the meta-experts, are utilized to estimate future fertility decline. Combining the information from three qualitatively very different sources, we are able to provide a new set of fertility assumptions to feed into the IIASA/Oxford education projections. This paper discusses a new assumption making approach for countries in today’s high fertility world and compares the differences in methods and results to the Bayesian projection methodology introduced by the United Nations.