The World in Graphs

The Worlds Strangest Population Pyramids

Countries whose populations don’t look anything like the average

Graphs created by the author

Demography is the study of human populations and their characteristics.

Age distribution graphs are a common visualization for better understanding a country's population. Today, I’m ranking them by strangeness.

The data comes from the World Development Indicators dataset, which you can find on the Worlds Bank website.

For reference, here’s the age distribution graph for the world's population in 2021.

Graph created by the author

Let’s look at some countries whose distributions don’t look like that.

#1: Sint Maarten

At the top of the list is a small Caribbean island with a modest population of forty thousand people called Sint Marteen.

Now, this distribution looks so strange that I’m questioning the data. How come there are almost no people between 30 and 40?