Demographic Balancing Equation

The demographic balancing equation is the fundamental accounting identity of population change: a population at the end of a period equals its size at the start, plus births, minus deaths, plus in-migrants, minus out-migrants. It is the bookkeeping rule that ties together all the components of population dynamics and guarantees internal consistency in population estimates and projections. Because it is an exact identity, it also serves as a powerful estimation tool — any single unknown component, most often net migration, can be recovered as the residual once the others are known.