Visualising the demographic components of change

Shaping the age structures of Australian State and Territory populations.

The population pyramid is one of the most popular ways of visualising population age structure. The standard form consists of two rotated histograms of population by age group, with males on the left and females on the right, and the youngest ages at the base and the oldest at the top. This standard population pyramid is often used to summarise the demographic history of a population over the course of the previous century or so. But a key limitation is that it only shows the size of each age-sex group, omitting information on the contributions of different demographic processes which shaped the population’s current age structure. This poster presents a different way of illustrating age structure through components-of-change population pyramids (Wilson, 2016) which show how births, deaths and net migration have shaped the current population age structures of Australian States and Territories.

Components-of-change population pyramids for Australia and its States and Territories

Demography North