

Which countries have the youngest populations? - dominotw
http://www.rferl.org/contentinfographics/wolrd-bank-global-population-map/25451252.html

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infinitone
Interesting, but I would of assumed most countries in the ME to have such a
high young % due to the ongoing wars/invasions/attacks in that region. It'd be
interesting to correlate this with the female % of population, may be similar.

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tokenadult
A lot of demographers would say that the causation goes the other way around
from what you said, in other words that countries with young populations tend
to get involved in more wars and more domestic unrest.

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bodyfour
Yep -- all you need to get a good war going is an excess of young men and a
border. For a domestic conflict you can skip the second part.

Or you can look at it from a purely economic standpoint: if your military-aged
men are mostly finding gainful employment and you want to raise an army you
need to either conscript or pay competitive wages. Either way you're damaging
your economy. If you have far more people that age then prospective jobs it's
way cheaper to convince some of them to put on a uniform.

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zokier
14 year age seems fairly arbitrary boundary. I wonder where the biggest
changes would be if the limit was at eg. 18 or 25 years old.

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x1798DE
I'm guessing that's how the data are actually gathered for whatever reason.
The UN World Population Prospectus has various breakdowns here, and they group
people in 5-year groups, so there's a break at 14 and a break at 19. I'm
guessing that's where this chart came from.

If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say it's probably done this way to
make data more comparable between countries for whatever reason. I'm not
exactly sure why that would be necessary, but generally when you see something
weird like this, it's because something changes a lot from culture to culture,
so they use wider buckets to capture everyone who is reasonably comparable.
Maybe it's some combination of when different cultures start counting your age
and a lack of good birth records in poorer areas, and they figure people can
more or less estimate which 5 year block you're in. Another possibility is
that the older data sets were collected using some form that had you blocked
off in 5 year blocks for whatever reason, and they can't change it now without
invalidating the comparability of the data sets.

EDIT: If anyone's interested, I found this manual [1] on estimating population
age and sex where they go into detail about the assumptions in the five-year
age group method. Doesn't really explain why this is desirable, though - I
think it might have something to do with how census data are collected in
different countries.

[0] [http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-
Data/population.htm](http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/population.htm)

[1]
[http://www.un.org/esa/population/techcoop/PopProj/manual3/ch...](http://www.un.org/esa/population/techcoop/PopProj/manual3/chapter2.pdf)

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hrktb
I think it could be because of education programs, where available of course.
I'd guess most of the country enforcing mandatory schooling do it for people
below 14~16 years old. For instance France is 16, India is 14, Japan is 15.
I'd wager in these countries there is more resources spent and more
reliability in tracking the children below the minimum schooling age.

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mallamanis
Although it is interesting, I think that the data should be normalized for
life expectancy. A country with a lower life expectancy will necessarily have
a younger population. So instead of 14 years old, it would make sense to show
the age of the (e.g.) first percentile of the population.

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x1798DE
> _A country with a lower life expectancy will necessarily have a younger
> population._

This is not necessarily true. Generally the number for "life expectancy" that
is quoted is life expectancy at birth, which is roughly the average age of
people at their death. In a lot of poorer countries, this number ends up being
driven by infant mortality (to see why, consider a country where, if you
survive infancy, you live to be 100 years old, but 50% of all infants die -
the "life expectancy at birth" of such a country would be about 50).

Generally, I think it's understood that the "youth" of a population is a sort
of measure of adult life expectancy. Though I suppose it can also be a measure
of the birth rate (weighted by infant mortality) across countries. I think the
two factors end up being fairly intimately tied to one another (likely by a
third factor, wealth), so it's not absurd to conflate the two.

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silvertonia
It's just the same data in 3 different forms, right? And the second is pretty
misleading, comparing percentages as if they were some part of a whole.

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transfire
Gaza

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transfire
I love how the truth gets down voted!

