ABSTRACT

The study of sex and age structures of a population has remained an important area of interest in demographic studies. This is because of the demographic and socio-economic implications of the sex and age structure of a society. The sex and age structure define the limit of reproductive potential of a society, determines a nations manpower supply, educational requirement and household formation which in turn determines the need fro new housing units. The sex and age structure of a population at any given time are determined by past trends in fertility, morality ad migration. For fixed levels of fertility and migration a population with lower morality level will have larger percentage in childhood ages in the most advanced ages and consequently reduced percentage in the middle age groups. This is because the influence of morality is more at the extremes of age distribution. However, the influence of differences in morality levels in age structure reduces as the expectation of life increases i.e. as mortality reduces. If morality declines uniformly over all ages, the age structure of the population remains unchanged. If morality declines at the order ages, the populatipn of older persons in the population increases and the median ages of the population increases. ii on the other hand, morality declines affect infancy and early childhood, the proportion of children in the population increases and thus reduces the median age of population. Thus, the result of morality changes along would be to increase or reduce the proportions of young and old in a population in relation to the population of the intermediate age groups.