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Roma population growth rates - recently detected trends 1989-2006
Hector McNeill1
Although there is official denial as to the existance of ethnically-based statistics, there are in fact househoild surveys carried out through different entities which pull together, at village level, very accurate family profiles including age distributions and number of children in Romani families.
ECRE has received information from such surveys and have transmitted some signifcant facts of relevance to SEEL for use in CESS.
Over the period 1989 through 2005 several young Romani couples have had less children than their parents did. This is in large part related to the very difficult economic circumstances they have faced during the last 15 years and a natural desire to have a reasonable family life by being able to provide for less children.
In many cases where women were having 5 or more children, some of their children are restricting the number of children to 2 or 3. Naturally in other families ther has been no such effect. Based upon, admittedly limited national representability but very accurate community-based precision it is evident that the Roma birth rate has fallen over this period and probably is no longer 3.6% and could have fallen to around 3% or less.
Adjusting CESS
Therefore a progressive weighting of the 3.6% growth rate, downwards, has been introduced into the CESS model. This means the historic figures and the data generated for up to around 2006 is reasonably accurate while the projection figure could be progressively inaccurate as a result of lack of knowledge of the likely changes in birth rates in the future.
Accuracy
However, on the topic of calculating the economic impacts of lack of education and training upon the GNP we are largely concerned with segments of the population in the workforce and those entering the workforce, the youngest of which were born 16 years ago.
Therefore we can remain confident that the broad orders of magnitude gained by CESS are sufficiently accurate for this purpose.
Orders of magnitude
At all times it is important to understand that CESS, at this stage of development, is assessing the orders of magnitude of key variables so as to determine GNP deficits with a useful level of precision. Useful can be considered to be deteremining whether or not the GNP deficit estimates are of such an order that further refine ment of the model is worthwhile.
Output is already significant
Our current opinion is that the GNP deficits are highly significant, even with something like 15% possible error in the projections, and that refining the model is well worthwhile so as to develop a more refined basis for accurate decision analysis and support for designing effective policy.
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The word cess is an old English term for tax or fiscal buden
1 Hector McNeill is the Systems Co-ordinator at the Systems Engineering Economics Lab, Portsea Isle, Hampshire.