Ages of Myanmar

When one hears the word “census”, there are so many census-related variables that come to his or her mind. It may be ethnicity, location, gender ratio, etc. For me, somehow it was “age”. I don’t know why age was the first that came to my mind. Maybe because my background was in biostatistics and I always used to see numbers in terms of birth and death rates. 

So basically my curiosity lies in knowing which age group is living where.

Before I moved onto digging through this question, there is a confession to make. I am horrible at looking at plain numbers. I am crazy, don’t you think? I am a statistician, I should be good with numbers. Truth is that I should have been an artist instead. I see patterns and understand things better when I draw pictures or color things. You can imagine that I used to be one of those students who color-coded all the notes and had an average of 30 color pens in her pencil case.

Back to my question: I decided to chart out a 100% column graph to find out more about this question. I LOVE 100% column graphs. It reminds me of being a geologist looking at the Earth’s layers and trying to find out which thick layer contains most amount of oil that I can dig up and sell off.

 

Age versus State Region

This graph wow-ed me. It shows not only the percentage of population living across each state region but also the change in the population across age group. I love this graph because it makes me understand the population structure without having to do any math. Here are a few of my observations.

1. Even if you combine all the people in Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Chin, Mon, Rakhine, Tanintharyi and Naypyitaw, it is still less than the people living in Yangon and Mandalay combined. The difference in population density is humongous.
2. Something happened to Shan people every 10 years. There is a spike in Shan’s percentage of national population every 10 years. My bet is that some good amount of Shan people didn’t remember their age so they just rounded off their ages.
3. Shan people again: Their percentage share of population is bigger when people are younger. Two possible explanations are that their birth rate is high or the older Shan folks don’t want to live in the Shan State.
4. Yangon itself has an interesting pattern. Its share of population is very small for younger age groups, hinting at the family-size conscious life style of Yangon YUPPIES. But the share peaks at the age of 22, which can be suggesting that the rural migration to the former capital may happen around that age, whether for work or study.

 

Age vs Gender

Another interesting phenomena is that as women in Myanmar live longer than men. Well the trend is true everywhere on the world but almost 20% change from birth (50-50) to death (67-33) is quite huge. The difference seems to happen at the age of 15. My advice to guys: please try to be safe once you become of age.