The projection of the number of households for UN member countries – utopia or valuable approach?

Sabine Springer, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

In two volumes of the Global Report on Human Settlements of UN-Habitat household projections are published for nearly all UN member countries. The present study examines the feasibility and the limits of such a global model. Difficulties, such as restricted data availability and data quality, variations in the definition of households, methodological problems and the length of the horizon interval, will be analysed in view of their impact on the validity of the results. Since the household projections are linked to the population projections produced by UN Population Division, all problematic issues of a global population projection model add to those of the household projections. To evaluate the quality of the results of the original and a modified model the results are compared to national projections from other sources. The conclusion will give an evaluation of the usefulness of such very rough indicators of general tendencies in the household formation.