Projections 2030 and the Future

In September 2012, the conference «Present in the Future – The Portuguese in 2030», organised by Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, brought together national and international experts to debate and envision four major issues that will be decisive in the coming years: ageing and generational conflict; families, work and fertility; inequalities: population and resources; population flows and future projects. In this context, demographers Maria Filomenda Mendes and Maria João Valente Rosa presented a set of projections for demographic changes in Portugal over the coming decades.

Using solid prospective methodologies (cohort component method), the authors presented three foreseeable scenarios for 2030 (as well as indicative results for 2050, aimed at extrapolating the effect of certain types of behaviour over time)

• A «Scenario 0», where between 2010 and 2030 and between 2030 and 2050 everything would remain as it is today, unchanged, in terms of fertility and an average number of children per woman of 1.37 (ISF – synthetic fertility index) and a life expectancy at birth of 76.4 years for men and 82.3 years for women.
• A «Scenario 1», where there would be an increase in fertility levels – reaching 2.0 children per woman in 2030 and 2.1 children in 2050 (generation replacement threshold), as well as an increase in age at death, with life expectancy at birth for men rising from the current 76.4 years to 80 years (in 2030 and 2050) and life expectancy for women rising from the current 82.3 years to 86 years (in 2030 and 2050).
• A «Scenario 2» – the most plausible – where there would be a more moderate increase in fertility levels, reaching 1.6 children in 2030 and 2050, but mortality would reach the same levels as in the previous scenario (life expectancy at birth for men would rise from the current 76.4 years to 80 years in 2030 and 2050, and for women from the current 82.3 years to 86 years in 2030 and 2050).

Once these scenarios had been established, they outlined the national demographic reality that each of them would imply.

Along with this data, you can also read a number of comments made by sociologist Ana Nunes de Almeida, sociologist (and former Chairman of FFMS) António Barreto and economists Fernando Ribeiro Mendes and Pedro Telhado Pereira, and you can watch an interview with demographer Carl Haub, about these future scenarios for the Portuguese population.

With the projections presented at the «Present in the Future – The Portuguese in 2030» conference in September 2012, as well as the comments made and interview given at that time, FFMS seeks not only to anticipate what Portuguese society might be like in the coming decades and what challenges each of the possible scenarios might pose, but also to provide the public with elements for a more sustained reflection and more informed discussion on the population trends underway.