Simulation of Demographic Change in Palestinian Territories

TL;DR

This paper models demographic changes in Palestinian territories, projecting future age structure shifts and highlighting potential social challenges due to aging populations, using a custom Fortran simulation tool.

Contribution

It introduces a Fortran-based simulation method to analyze and project demographic trends in Palestine, emphasizing future aging population issues.

Findings

Future population will have a higher proportion of over-60-year-olds.

Demographic shifts may lead to social and economic challenges.

Recommendations include increasing retirement age and women's employment.

Abstract

Mortality, birth rates and retirement play a major role in demographic changes. In most cases, mortality rates decreased in the past century without noticeable decrease in fertility rates, this leads to a significant increase in population growth. In many poor countries like Palestinian territories the number of births has fallen and the life expectancy increased. In this article we concentrate on measuring, analyzing and extrapolating the age structure in Palestine a few decades ago into future. A Fortran program has been designed and used for the simulation and analysis of our statistical data. This study of demographic change in Palestine has shown that Palestinians will have in future problems as the strongest age cohorts are the above-60-year olds. We therefore recommend the increase of both the retirement age and women employment.