Existing nationwide population projections focus on highly aggregated spatial units. The most disaggregated nationwide study is provided by the German Federal Institute for Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Research (BBSR) and forecasts population at the county level until 2040 (BBSR, 2021). The Federal Statistical Office’s projections - the benchmark for German population projections - are limited to the entire country or to the federal states. Our novel data set offers a population projection with a resolution of one square kilometer up to 2060. Since many local socioeconomic characteristics show great spatial heterogeneity, as documented by RWI-GEO-GRID (RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, 2022), the need for a small-scale population forecast becomes apparent. We closely follow the assumptions on fertility, mortality and (out) migration of the German Federal Statistical Office, so that our forecast reflects those estimates at the national level, but provides detailed information about local communities, including gender and age structure. The generated data set is made available to researchers.
The data are available as Scientific Use File (SUF) for scientific, non-commercial research (https://doi.org/10.7807/pop:forecast:suf:v2.1). The data are available as CSV files. The data are also available for individual years, where each row of the data set specifies the population for a particular age-gender combination. Data access requires a signed data use agreement. Only researchers from scientific institutions are eligible to apply for data access to the SUF. The SUF can be used at the user’s workplace. Upon request, we can provide snapshots of the data or data at higher aggregated regional levels as a Public Use File (PUF) for non-researchers. Data access is provided by the Research Data Center Ruhr at the RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research (FDZ Ruhr). Applications for data access can be submitted online at https://www.rwi-essen.de/en/research-advice/further/research-data-center-ruhr-fdz/data-access. The application form contains a short description and title of the project, the cooperation, the department, the expected duration of the data use as well as the participants in the project.
- General information
- RWI (2023), FDZ Data description: RWI-GEO-POP-FORECAST: Small-Scale Population Projection V2.1. RWI Projektberichte. Download
Please contact Dr. Patrick Thiel in case of questions.
All rights reserved to RWI and the author of the code, Dr. Patrick Thiel. In the case of used libraries, the main file (_targets.R) should be consulted.