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Europe Is Older, Latin America Is Ageing Faster
Share of the population aged 65 and over, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the world, yearly, %
3 of 3 series are above their level a year earlier·3 of 3 are at a five-year high
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
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Mid-year population, UN World Population Prospects estimates; UN continent groupings. The share is a Palanor calculation: the UN’s five-year age groups from 65 up, over the total. Faster means in proportion to where each region started.
Europe is the oldest continent: roughly one person in five is 65 or over, about twice the share in Latin America. But Latin America started much younger, and since 1970 its over-65 share has grown faster in proportion than Europe’s or the world’s.
What this chart reads
- Population Aged 65 and Over: Europeas “Europe”behindlatest 2023-07-01
- Population Aged 65 and Over: Latin America and the Caribbeanas “Latin America & Caribbean”behindlatest 2023-07-01
- World Population Aged 65 and Overas “World”behindlatest 2023-07-01
Sources
Population Aged 65 and Over: Europe. Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition. https://population.un.org/wpp/ Licence: © 2024 by United Nations, made available under a Creative Commons license CC BY 3.0 IGO (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/). Palanor's copy is unchanged except where this section says otherwise. Palanor adds the UN's five-year age groups from 65–69 up to 100+ and divides by the total population of the same year; that sum is the only change. The UN revises the whole series every two years; the next revision replaces these figures back to 1950.
Population Aged 65 and Over: Latin America and the Caribbean. Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition. https://population.un.org/wpp/ Licence: © 2024 by United Nations, made available under a Creative Commons license CC BY 3.0 IGO (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/). Palanor's copy is unchanged except where this section says otherwise. Palanor adds the UN's five-year age groups from 65–69 up to 100+ and divides by the total population of the same year; that sum is the only change. The UN revises the whole series every two years; the next revision replaces these figures back to 1950.
World Population Aged 65 and Over. Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition. https://population.un.org/wpp/ Licence: © 2024 by United Nations, made available under a Creative Commons license CC BY 3.0 IGO (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/). Palanor's copy is unchanged except where this section says otherwise. Palanor adds the UN's five-year age groups from 65–69 up to 100+ and divides by the total population of the same year; that sum is the only change. The UN revises the whole series every two years; the next revision replaces these figures back to 1950.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.