Population Projections with ColOpenData

We can use ColOpenData to retrieve population projections and back-projections on multiple levels of spatial aggregation, including municipalities, departments and national levels. Availability of years depends on spatial levels. These projections include differentiation by gender and even ethnic groups; however, the latter is only available for municipalities.

Availability of years by spatial levels goes as follows:

Level	Years
National	1950 - 2070
National with sex	1985 - 2050
Department	1985 - 2050
Department with Sex	1985 - 2050
Municipality	1985 - 2035
Municipality with Sex	1985 - 2035
Municipaity with Sex and Ethnic Groups	2018 - 2035

For this example, we will present projections and back projections of national population by area, sex and age for the period from 1950 to 2070. We will observe the expected female population under 99 by personalized age brackets for 2034.

We will first load the needed libraries.

library(ColOpenData)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

Now we can download the data. We will use the function download_pop_projections(), which has five parameters:

spatial_level character with the spatial level to be consulted. Can be either "national", "department" or "municipality".
start_year numeric with the start year to be consulted.
end_year numeric with the end year to be consulted.
include_sex logical for including (or not) division by sex. Default is FALSE.
include_ethnic logical for including (or not) division by ethnic group (only available for "municipality"). Default is FALSE.

asen <- download_pop_projections(
  spatial_level = "national",
  start_year = 2034,
  end_year = 2034,
  include_sex = TRUE,
  include_ethnic = FALSE
)
#> Original data is retrieved from the National Administrative Department
#> of Statistics (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística -
#> DANE).
#> Reformatted by package authors.
#> Stored by Universidad de Los Andes under the Epiverse TRACE iniative.

We will filter the downloaded data for ages under 99.

female_2034 <- asen %>%
  filter(
    area == "total",
    sexo == "mujer",
    edad != "100_y_mas"
  ) %>%
  mutate(edad = as.numeric(edad))

Age groups will be defined by breaks and included in the original dataset.

age_groups <- cut(female_2034[["edad"]],
  breaks = c(-1, 2, 12, 19, 29, 39, 49, 59, 69, 79, 89, 99),
  labels = c(
    "0-2", "3-12", "13-19", "20-29", "30-39", "40-49",
    "50-59", "60-69", "70-79", "80-89", "90-99"
  )
)
female_groups <- female_2034 %>%
  mutate(age_group = age_groups) %>%
  group_by(age_group) %>%
  summarise(total_sum = sum(total))

Finally, we can plot the output.

ggplot(female_groups, aes(
  x = age_group,
  y = total_sum
)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity", fill = "#f04a4c", color = "black", width = 0.6) +
  labs(
    title = "Female population counts in Colombia by age group for 2034",
    x = "Age group",
    y = "Female population"
  ) +
  theme_minimal() +
  theme(
    plot.background = element_rect(fill = "white", colour = "white"),
    panel.background = element_rect(fill = "white", colour = "white"),
    axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1),
    plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5)
  )