The biggest flexible in the whole calculation is the amount of wasted ITA.Interesting!!!...Thanks for the info!
So, having increased all quotas for this year, we may only get to see 70k ITAs for 2018, compared to 2017 where the targets were lesser but somehow the ITAs shot to 85k.
Just confused!
Family size tends to be more stable. Even if for EE, it is smaller than what it was for paper based applications (1.9 against 2.2).
The difference might have come from the following:
1. Wasted ITA (they might have used statics data from 2015 which were from much smaller sample, so they might have overestimated wasted ITA)
2. Better 4 years goal. There were signs that total immigration amount shall go up to 450k, but a bit more conservative plan had to be used (this is pure politics and the impact of illegal crossing and the latest election polls, that might have prompted them to go down).
Again, we are still missing enough long term data to evaluate the system properly.
Anything before summer 2016 was distorted, because the old system was running out. That makes it unsuitable for proper long term analysis.
And 2017 seems to be off as well as a result of the unbalanced data from 2015, too big draws might have been used.
So we would need a year without big differences between quarters (2016 and 2017 have both like 50% ITA difference between first and second half year), in order to predict safety zone (if you have your CRS is 450, you can wait for next few draws without doing much) and the zone of uncertainty (if you are below 430, better improve your score, because your turn might never come).
And of course that safety zone will evolve depending on the quality of the applicants in the system and its notoriety.
