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Obtaining appropriate forecasts for the future population is a vital component of public policy analysis for issues ranging from government budgets to pension systems. Traditionally, demographic forecasters rely on a deterministic approach with various scenarios informed by expert opinion. This approach has been widely criticized, and we apply an alternative stochastic modeling framework that can provide a probability distribution for forecasts of the Japanese population. We find the potential for much greater variability in the future demographic situation for Japan than that implied by existing deterministic forecasts. This demands greater flexibility from policy makers when confronting population aging issues.

This paper aims to provide a long-term financial vision for the Vietnamese pension scheme using stochastic modeling for key variables under an actuarial framework. In particular, we project the pension fund balances in order to see whether the scheme will be financially sustainable. The median values of the status-quo projections show that the pension fund will be depleted in about 2052 with a 90-percent confidence interval range of 8 years. The estimated results from our sensitivity tests show that the retirement age, the indexation method for pension benefits, and the contribution rate are all crucial determinants of the pension fund balance in the long term. At the same time, some factors, including coverage rates, administrative costs, the long-term fertility rate, and the rate of return on pension fund assets play less important roles in determining the fund's balance.