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Your text describes Age-Sex Pyramids of populations of countries in 5 year age cohorts. Choose a few countries of different socio-economic levels i.e. Sweden and Bolivia, or Canada and Botswana. Analyze and compare their Age-Sex Pyramids. What population issues can you conclude could be associated with each? Can we go beyond socio-economic issues and make assumptions on types of economic or political systems?

I chose to compare India and Switzerland, two VERY different countries with two very different Age-Sex pyramids. Switzerland maintains a mostly rectangular pyramid, which coincides with the fact that it is a well developed country. One interesting thing about it though is that the overall population of Switzerland is projected to decrease by 2050. In each population summary the number of average child bearing adults (20-44) drops by several tens of thousands. This then causes the number of children born to drop, thus continuing the cycle. The only way I can think to explain this is that the population continues to focus less and less on raising a family and instead focuses on maintaining the economy and industry of Switzerland. I have no first hand experience but I am told that Switzerland is a very beautiful and expensive country to live in. Perhaps any influx of immigration will be mostly older more established families and retirees.India on the other hand appears ready to explode in population over the next 50 years. The pyramid for the year 2000 is a clearly defined evergreen tree indicating an under developed country. The average life span is currently pretty low, with the same number of people ages 60+ as the small range of 30-34, about 76 million. The projections however change rapidly and by 2050 the pyramid is no longer an evergreen shape but a very large rectangle. It estimates that there will be 1.5 billion Indians between the ages of 0-59 with no age group any higher than the other. To me this indicates they are projecting India to become MUCH more developed in the areas of healthcare, education, and nutrition. In highly developed countries the birth rate lowers and in India this will also apparently be the case. There will be so many child bearing adults however that the overall number of children age 0-4 will stay the same as 2000, about 120 million. My guess is that if you are in the field of healthcare or education or anything else that flourishes with a large population, India is the place you want to be for the next 50 years.

Sorry, this is for my Geography class, its more boring than EDU but I thought you might find this interesting.