The Centre for Family and Population Research (CFPR) at National University of Singapore (NUS) is planning to hold, online, the 2nd International Conference and Training Workshop on Household and Living Arrangement Projections for Informed Decision-Making on 13-14 January 2022, in collaboration with Population Division of the United Nations (UNPD), Asian Population Association (APA), Center for Healthy Aging and Development Study, National School of Development (CHADS/NSD) at Peking University (PKU), China Population and Development Research Centre (CPDRC) and Population Association of Singapore (PAS). The 1st International Conference and Training Workshop on Household and Living Arrangement Projections for Informed Decision-Making was held on May 9-11, 2019 in Beijing, jointly organized by CPDRC, CHADS/NSD at PKU, and CFPR at NUS.

Household projection is becoming a major research topic with high policy and business relevance. Population growth has slowed down in many countries around the world, with some already experiencing negative growth. In the meantime, households are undergoing major transformations, and numbers of households with various types are increasing quickly due to reduction. of household size. Household is the basic unit for analysing energy consumption, the demands of housing, home-consumer goods, eldercare, many other services, and planning of public facilities. Traditional approaches to population projections often dismiss household information, and may thus end up with inaccurate projections of home-based energy demands, housing, home-consumer goods and services that inadvertently mislead policymakers and market analysts.

As a leading tool in the field of household projections, the ProFamy extended cohort- component method/software simultaneously projects households of various types and sizes, considering the sex and age and living arrangements distributions of all individual members of the population under study. So far, scholars from 27 countries, UNFPA and World Bank have downloaded and used ProFamy free software for their projects on household and living arrangement projections to understand topics such as future changes of household structure, old-age living arrangements and care needs/costs, trends of population aging and human capital, future demands of energy, housing, furniture, automobiles and their environmental implications.

In addition to the same basic input data that standard population projections require, the main task of data preparation in order to use the ProFamy extended cohort-component method/software for household and living arrangement projections, is to estimate the age-sex-specific standard schedules of the occurrence/exposure (o/e) rates of marriage/union formation and dissolutions and the age-parity-specific o/e rates of marital and non-marital fertility. Estimations of these age-sex-specific o/e rates can be relatively easily done by employing recently developed ProFamy user-friendly and free R software DemoRates (www.profamy.com.cn).

This conference will present the cutting-edge development in the methods and applications of household and living arrangement projections, and will also provide valuable opportunity for interested participants to learn about the ProFamy and the newly developed R software DemoRates. Conference participation is open to the public and free of charge.