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Aging population presents demographic challenge in Cuba

Xinhua, September 7, 2016 Adjust font size:

An aging population remains the "main characteristic and challenge" for Cuba's demographic trends, the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI) announced on Tuesday.

In declarations published Tuesday by the official daily Granma, Juan Carlos Alfonso Fraga, the director of ONEI's population and development studies center, said that "a calculated perspective..has allowed us to make predictions on the sex and age of the Cuban population for a set period of time."

The body realized an investigation to predict the details of the island's population until 2030, in terms of the economically active population (those aged 15 and up) as well as the housing situation in rural and urban environments.

The study found that the economically active population would rise by almost 68,000 people in the 2015-2021 period to reach an estimated 5,097,439, but would then drop by 132,902 to reach an estimated 4,964,537 working-age Cubans by 2030.

However, the country will also see a large expansion in the number of households, which are set to rise from around 3.9 million in 2015 to 4.2 million in 2030.

Cuba is among the countries with the oldest average population in Latin America and the Caribbean, with those over 60 expecting to account for 26 percent of the population by 2030.

According to Statista, an international statistics aggregator, the average age of Cubans rose from 38.6 years old in 2010 to 41.2 in 2015, and is expected to reach 43.5 by 2020. Enditem