Cohort-Component Projection

Cohort-Component Projection is the standard demographic method for forecasting future population size and age-sex structure by explicitly tracking births, deaths, and migration for each age-sex cohort across discrete time steps. Systematically formalized in the textbook literature by Preston, Heuveline, and Guillot (2001), the method builds on foundational actuarial and demographic work dating to the early twentieth century and remains the workhorse technique used by national statistical offices and international organizations worldwide.