March 23, 2004 | News

"Inverse Projection Techniques" opens up new book series

"Inverse Projection Techniques. Old and New Approaches" is the first volume of the new book series Demographic Research Monographs established by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, and published by Springer Verlag. The volume has been edited by Dr. Elisabetta Barbi, research scientist at the MPIDR, and Professors Salvatore Bertino and Eugenio Sonnino, both at the University of Rome La Sapienza.

Inverse Projection enables inferences about fertility, mortality, and population age structures from observed series of births and deaths, and some information about population size.

In the late 1960s, Ronald Lee designed the Inverse Projection technique, thereby making an important contribution to progress in historical demographic studies. Since its introduction, several modifications have been made to Lee's original procedure in order to address some of its shortcomings and methodological limits, and to make the procedure suitable for existing sources. Not surprisingly, researchers involved in this field sometimes remained unpersuaded by the proposed solutions and the debate on inverse projection techniques, lively and stimulating as it has been, continued unabated. The contribution of Italian researchers to this debate was particularly active in the last decade.

The present volume collects mainly a selection of articles that were presented at the Workshop on Inverse Projection Techniques, organized by Elisabetta Barbi of the MPIDR Rostock in collaboration with Salvatore Bertino and Eugenio Sonnino. It was held in Sabaudia (Italy) on 25-27 May 2000 under the auspices of the Italian Society of Historical Demography.

Content overview:

• Ronald Lee: Reflections on Inverse Projection: Its Origins, Development, Extensions, and Relation to Forecasting
• Robert McCaa and Elisabetta Barbi: Inverse Projection: Fine-Tuning and Expanding the Method
• Alessandro Rosina: Using Information on the Age Distribution of Deaths in Population Reconstruction: An Extension of Inverse Projection with Applications
• Salvatore Bertino and Eugenio Sonnino: The Stochastic Inverse Projection and the Population of Velletri (1590-1870)
• Lorenzo del Panta and Valerio Rodilossi: Testing Inverse Projection, Differentiated Inverse Projection and Stochastic Inverse Projection: A Reconstruction of the Population of Sardinia between 1861 and 1921 Using Three Different Techniques
• Elisabetta Barbi and Jim Oeppen: Comparing the Results from Generalised Inverse Projection and Stochastic Inverse Projection
• Salvatore Bertino and Eugenio Sonnino: Cohort Reproduction Patterns in Small Italian Towns: Results from Stochastic Inverse Projection
• Alberto Palloni: Malthusian Checks: An Investigation into Sufficiency Conditions, Long-Term Dynamics and Implications for Inverse Projections