In a new publication in Demography, CSDE Research Scientist Hana Ševčíková, CSDE Affiliate Adrian Raftery (Statistics and Sociology), and Nathan Welch develop a method for forecasting international migration that takes a country’s age structure into account. Drawing on migration data from 1990 to 2020 across the 200 most populous countries, the authors build a statistical model that projects migration rates through 2100. To develop their forecast,  Ševčíková, Raftery, and Welch develop a migration age structure index (MASI) for the purpose of recalculating and rescaling past net migration rates, decomposed into in- and out-migration, to remove the influence of the population age distribution. Factoring in age structure leads to narrower prediction intervals. Among countries with rapidly aging and shrinking populations, this approach predicts less emigration than conventional models and therefore less severe population decline.