On a problem in population structure (Q1185052)

Consider the age structured population \(n(t\mid 1)=Pn(t)\), where \(P\) is a \(k\times k\) Leslie matrix, \(n(t)\) is the population vector at time \(t\). The author assumes that \(P\) is columnwise stochastic. It follows that \(\lim_{t\to\infty}P^ t=L\), where \(L\) is a constant matrix. The problem considered is to obtain an upper bound for the elements of the matrix \(P^ t-L\). For a matrix \(A=(a_{ij})\), let \(\mu(A)=\max\{| a_{ij}|\}\). It is shown that \[ \mu(P^ t-L)\leq cp^ t t^{k- 1}, \] where \(c\) is a constant, \(p=\max\{p_ 1,p_ 2,\dots,p_{k-1}\}\), and \(p_ 1,p_ 2,\dots,p_{k-1}\) are the elements in the first subdiagonal of \(P\).