About the demographic indicators

We provide demographic related indicators for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and subnational regions within these countries.

The indicators in this database are:

Fertility rate indicators are computed on the basis of birth history information. Age-specific fertility rates indicate the number of births per 1000 women in a specific age group per year. The total fertility rate indicates the total number of children a woman age 50 has given birth to.

The dependency ratio is the share of the working age population divided by the share of the dependent population. The working age population are all individuals aged between 15-64. All individuals aged below 15 or above 64 are considered to be the dependent population.

Construction of indicators

The indicators in this database are created by aggregation from household surveys, i.e. taking the average of the values of a characteristic of individuals or households in an area.

The sub-national areas that are used for aggregation are based on the geographic information that is present in the survey datasets. The available regional coding is often, but not always, based on official administrative subdivisions used in the countries.

In cases where regional subdivisions have changed over time, the subdivisions used in earlier and/or later surveys are adjusted to keep comparability.

For relatively small datasets a reduction in regions may be done to increase the number of cases on the basis of which aggregation takes place.

For some countries for which regional divisions differ too much between years to make data comparable, different divisions are used for different years.

Data sources

We combine survey data for over 500 recent (1990+) household surveys and other sources for 130+ developing countries and almost 1,500 subnational regions from the following sources:

More information

Detailed information on the construction of dependency ratios can be found in:

Crombach, L. & Smits, J. (2020), The demographic window of opportunity and economic growth at sub-national level in 91 developing countries. GDL Working paper 20-101.

Detailed information on the construction of indicators through aggregation can be found in:

Smits, J. (2016), GDL Area Database: Sub-national development indicators for research and policy-making. GDL Working paper 16-101.