In a growing number of countries international migration has a significant impact on the population size and structure this is both true for sending and receiving countries. Despite this fact most population projections apply the residual concept of net migration in their underlying models and rely on fairly simple assumptions about future migration flows.

This paper proposes an alternative approach by modelling immigration and emigration separately. This approach is integrated in a global population projection that covers bilateral migration flows between (almost) all countries of the world. These assumptions are based on flow estimated derived from a conversion of available UN DESA time series on stocks of international migrants into bilateral migration flows.

The paper develops the integrated population forecasting model. It presents and discusses the results for a selected number of countries as well as for the EU as a whole. And it compares the results of this alternative projection with those of the standard UN Population Prospect forecast (main variant with migration and contrasting variant without migration).

For a more detailed account of data, methods and results details see also the technical paper: Th. Buettner, R. Muenz. 2024. The Impact of Migration on Future Population Change. Technical Information. KNOMAD Working Paper no. 60, published in parallel to this paper.