Aging Populations

National population trends depend on a number of factors, including such things as fertility rates, death rates, immigration, and emigration.  At this point, though, I’m only going to look at general population trends for a few countries, without looking into particular influences or causes: today’s age breakouts compared with their projections over the next couple of generations, along with current net immigration rates, for Brazil, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States.  This list is selected purely for an initial, superficial look in the mirror and at some of our major economic competitors (with the deliberate exclusion of the EU as a whole, since it remains sufficiently fragmented among its constituent nations from a political and economic perspective that some of the individual nations are more important to me than the continent).  The UN’s report World Population Ageing: 1950-2050 is my source for the population data; I massaged data from the CIA’s The World Factbook 2011 snapshot for the immigration numbers.