Forecasting population growth is very challenging, but really important for government service provision planning and budgeting. In this post, Jan-Hendrilk Pretorius assesses how much Statistics South Africa has revised national population estimates and how aligned their projections have been to subsequent estimates of population.
We compare historical vintages of population estimates from 2016 to the latest set of historical estimates. If a value is positive, it implies that historical estimates have under-estimated population. For most provinces, historical population estimates are now higher than they were initially. Revisions to current year estimates vary a lot across time and provinces, but have been quite large at times, as high as 8 percentage points.
