The many Mexicos. Stochastic forecast 2001-2050

Resumen

Demographic data from Mexico has serious problems of coherence. Most recent estimations are increasing the discrepancies instead of reducing them. Based on analysis of inconsistencies in demographic data, we made a stochastic forecast of Mexican population for the period 2001-2050. The stochastic forecast is composed of random simulations of fourdifferent scenarios, which are given by dissimilarities on demographic estimations of the period 1985-2000. This technique allowed us to take into account the uncertainty embedded in Mexican data. Our results imply that is very unlikely (probability 0.07) that Mexican population size in 2005 was lower than 103.2 millions as published in the recent official population count. This result adds up to requests made by other researchers about revisiting and composing consistent demographic estimations.