Household and Living Arrangement Projections

This book and its associated software are for forecasts of households, elderly living arrangements and health services needs/costs, housing, and the other households-related consumptions/services at national, state and sub-state levels. The new method for households and consumption forecasting (known as ProFamy) presented in this book is an innovatively extended cohort-component method. It has substantial merits as compared to the classic headship-rate method, that is not linked to demographic rates, projects only a few household types without size information, and deals with household "heads" but not other household members. ProFamy uses demographic rates as input and forecasts much more detailed household types and sizes, and living arrangements of all members of the population, including the elderly, adults, and children. Validation tests of household forecasts from 1990 to 2000 and then comparing the forecasts with the 2000 census observations for the United States as a whole, and the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Orange & Chatham Counties and the Town of Chapel Hill in North Carolina, respectively, show that the ProFamy method/software for household forecasting at national, state and sub-state levels works well. The applications of the ProFamy new method to the U.S. and Chinese households forecasting, social, business and policy analysis are presented in this book.