How the population is changing: the number of elderly people has doubled in 30 years

The subject of demography will increasingly become the dominant theme in the public debate. To a large extent, it already is, with the thousand ways in which welfare has changed: we need only consider how important the discussion about pensions has become and the numerous disputes that follow every attempt to change.

Unfortunately, the truth is that we are having to deal with a profound change in the population, in which the distribution of young people, adults and the elderly is radically different from previous decades.

Let us begin by analysing the movement of the population, starting, initially, with the age groups in 1982 and in 2015.

From the moving graph, we can see how the age groups of the population in Varese Province have changed in a little more than 30 years:

The first thing we can see is that the elderly population, aged 65 years and over, has literally doubled.

The largest age range is still that of 35 – 65 years, which numbered 389,701 people, in 2015.

Still in 2015, the number of women over 65 was much greater than the number of men, 114,646 compared to 85,006, and they were equal in the age range 35 – 65 years: women numbered 195,687, and men, 194,014.

In the next graph, where it is possible to analyse them, year by year, we can also see the number of centenarians. In 1992, for example, there were only 29 people aged 100 and over, whereas, in 2015, their number was 283.

The data, obtained from the Italian Central Institute of Statistics, contains actual numbers and provisional data for 2015.