Applied Population Projection for Regional and Local Planning

Academics are increasingly required to use their skills and expertise in applied contexts. Population geography is perhaps not regarded as the most obvious academic sub-discipline for applied research, but the techniques of spatial demographic analysis have become important to the commercial world as businesses have sought to improve their market share and develop their strategies for providing goods and services to maximum effect. Major commercial organisations have recognized the necessity to identify and target sub-sections of the population most likely to be their primary customers or to site their retail outlets at locations likely to generate maximum revenue (see chapters 8 and 12). Financial organisations selling life insurance have required increasingly detailed geographical information about life expectancy and illness in order to fix insurance premiums as the population ages. Whilst geodemographics has been a growth industry of the 1990s in the private sector (see chapter 14), there has also been a trend towards closer collaboration between academic demographers and public sector organisations such as local authorities and government departments in the last decade, as the latter have recognized the expertise available in universities and as the former have become more conscious of the need to respond to government emphasis on more policy relevant research.