GNP per Capita, Population Growth and Age Structure.

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Gemma Aubrey ES1151

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GNP per Capita, Population Growth and Age Structure

For a range of countries across the world I looked at figures including the population in thousands, the population growth (as an annual average change in % between1990-1995), Gross National Product (GNP) recorded in 1995 in US$ millions and the population in percentage form greater then 65 years old (in 1995). There seems to follow a trend based on the economic development of these countries, population growth tends to be greater in less developed countries like areas in Africa and of Asia such as Kenya (3.6%), Nigeria (3%) as opposed to more developed countries such as the USA (1%) and UK (0.3%).  Putting this kind of information into tables and graphs helps us to draw conclusions.

From the information I also calculated GpC which means GNP per capita or person, there also seems to be a trend here as more developed countries tend to have a higher GpC than lesser developed countries. Looking at this indicator is very useful as it takes into account the whole population size; only looking at GNP isn’t as useful in some cases because a country with a high GNP could be due to a larger population.

Taking into account all of the countries and indicators (mentioned in the first paragraph), I took a range of averages to see how greatly all the countries differed.

As you can see this takes into account all the data given, there are huge differences between the population in different countries India being the highest (935744) and The Soloman Islands being the lowest (378) though this doesn’t necessarily reflect the size of the country.  As I said previously looking at population growth the average is 2.3 and I took two examples above this and below this, less developed countries tend to be above the average whilst more developed countries tend to be below.  The highest country with population growth in 1995 is Yemen and lowest is Spain. This maybe due to the fact that people in more developed countries seem to have a greater focus on their careers nowadays whilst less developed countries still have children to help them with everyday working tasks to live and that contraception may not be as developed as other countries.

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Looking at the population greater then the age of 65 years, the country with the highest percentage is Sweden at 17.5% and second to that is the UK at 15.5%. The countries with the lowest percentage of 2.4% are Niger, Uganda and Yemen. This seems to follow a general trend as well that more developed countries have a higher percentage over 65 years old than the lesser developed countries. For the more developed countries there becomes an issue of an ageing population which is worsened by the fact that population growth for these countries seems lowest. Looking at less ...

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