The projections past 2010 are interesting too but they tend to smooth the curves which is probably not very realistic, as seen from the past. Nevertheless, it's interesting to see that the population of some countries has already started to shrink, like Russian Federation: http://populationpyramid.net/Russian+Federation/2010/
Regarding Afghanistan—there're many other “young” countries, f.ex. check Burundi, Venezuela, Madagascar. To be fair, the graph by itself doesn't tell whether the reason is high mortality rate or people expatriating, but admittedly the former is more likely…
I'm from Venezuela. I guess this doesn't affect these global numbers, but mortality is pretty high due to rampant crime. 20,000 were murdered in 2011. Murder rate is much much higher than other nations that get more media coverage, such as Mexico or Colombia. Caracas' murder rate was #1 in the world not too long ago.
Another thing is immigration. Pretty much most people who can leave, leave. However I recently read that less than 50,000 Venezuelans have emigrated to the US in the past 5 years, which is less than, say, Colombia (over 50k).
We hope we can turn the country around. Presidential elections are in 4 days.
- extreme gender imbalance in Qatar (probably due to migrant workers) : http://populationpyramid.net/Qatar/2010/
- Very clearly aging population in Japan : http://populationpyramid.net/Japan/2010/
- People dying quite young in Afghanistan: http://populationpyramid.net/Afghanistan/2010/
- Clear impact of WW2 in Europe in 1950 on the 20-30 age class: http://populationpyramid.net/EUROPE/1950/
The projections past 2010 are interesting too but they tend to smooth the curves which is probably not very realistic, as seen from the past. Nevertheless, it's interesting to see that the population of some countries has already started to shrink, like Russian Federation: http://populationpyramid.net/Russian+Federation/2010/