Population Pyramid Analysis

Population pyramid analysis is the description and interpretation of a population's age-sex structure through a back-to-back horizontal bar chart, with males on one side, females on the other, and age groups stacked from youngest at the bottom to oldest at the top. The shape of the pyramid encodes a population's fertility, mortality, and migration history and is the demographer's first diagnostic of whether a population is young and growing, ageing, or contracting.