The methodology for studying household projections in Hong Kong is not yet firmly established. However, there is no doubt that methodology is sufficient to study future household changes in a society. This dissertation presents a long-term household projection by family type for Hong Kong for the next fifty years. This study was conducted with a multi-dimensional macro-simulation model by considering all of the possible demographic events in household formation and dissolution: birth, death, migration, marriage, divorce and leaving the parental home. This model provided probabilistic projections for three key demographic factors - fertility, mortality and first marriage - based on stochastic time series models by incorporating judgments about future demographic behaviors from prior know...[ Read more ]

The methodology for studying household projections in Hong Kong is not yet firmly established. However, there is no doubt that methodology is sufficient to study future household changes in a society. This dissertation presents a long-term household projection by family type for Hong Kong for the next fifty years. This study was conducted with a multi-dimensional macro-simulation model by considering all of the possible demographic events in household formation and dissolution: birth, death, migration, marriage, divorce and leaving the parental home. This model provided probabilistic projections for three key demographic factors - fertility, mortality and first marriage - based on stochastic time series models by incorporating judgments about future demographic behaviors from prior knowledge, then applied transition probabilities or occurrence/exposure rates to the core transitions to depict the causal relationship between critical demographic determinants and the development of households, whereas propensities for other secondary transitions. The model catered to the demographic setting and data availability in Hong Kong.

The thesis also provides understanding of future household development in Hong Kong. The projection results based on the above three scenarios show that recent household changes in Hong Kong towards smaller and simpler households will continue in the next half century, but do not mean that Hong Kong households will quickly converge to the model of western countries in terms of mean household size and single person households. The proportion of one-person households will increase dramatically, and is expected to overtake “one couple with child(ren)” households as the dominant type of household in Hong Kong by around 2020.

This thesis incorporates a sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of the simulation and, at the same time, to see the effects of changes in demographic proximate determinants on Hong Kong household development in the next decades, up to 2046.

Key words: household projection, model, Hong Kong