The demography of Papua and New Guinea's indigenous population

Abstract

This study aims to make a significant contribution to knowledge about the demography of Papua-New Guinea's indigenous population. It presents information that was collected over the last half century or so by a great variety of people, and tries to reach reasonably firm conclusions on the population's vital rates, age structure and future growth by combining the most satisfactory elements to a plausible pattern. But the data are fragmentary and defective, and the best elements in them cannot always be identified by analysis. Sometimes, a fairly subjective judgement as to what might have gone wrong during their collection is necessary to explain obvious distortions. The interpretation of incomplete sets of data of doubtful accuracy is thus an important facet of the work undertaken here and model distributions are used in the process. Ideally, model and reference distributions should serve to 'discipline' reported data (Brass 1969). In the present case there often is, unfortunately, little information that can be disciplined and models are mainly used to bridge gaps that would otherwise put an end to the analysis. But as they are chosen as judiciously as possible and by taking all sources into account, this is probably the best alternative. Show more