Demographics and Destiny

"Demographics is destiny" is an overused phrase. And to make things worse, it isn't even true. Demographics isn't destiny, but it does play a major role in the rise and fall of civilizations, which may influence where you invest.

So we thought it would be interesting to see how the populations represented by the international exchange-traded funds we follow stack up against the U.S. in terms of demographics.

Using estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, we calculated the expected population growth over the next generation, or 25 years, as well as the percentage of the population age 65 years or older, both now and in 2032. For single-country ETFs this was easy, but for the regional funds we used a weighted average of the constituent countries. ...