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Abstract
Forecasting the population of Poland is very challenging. Firstly, the country has been undergoing rapid demographic changes. In the 1990s, they were influenced by the political, economic, and social consequences of the collapse of the communist regime. Since 2004 they have been shaped by Poland’s entry into the European Union. Secondly, the availability of statistics for Poland on past trends is strongly limited. The resulting high uncertainty of future trends should be dealt with systematically, which is an essential part of the stochastic forecast presented in this paper. The forecast results show that the Polish population will constantly decline during the next decades and Poland will face significant ageing as indicated by a rising old-age dependency-ratio. There is a probability of 50 % that in 2050 the population will number between 27 and 35 millions compared to 38.2 in 2004 and that there will be at least 63 persons aged 65+ per 100 persons aged 19-64.
Author's affiliation Anna Matysiak Warsaw School of Economics, Poland Beata Nowok Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute, Netherlands
