page_title: Demographics of Bhutan
section_title: Demographic statistics
hierarchical_section_title: Demographics of Bhutan / Demographic statistics
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: A population pyramid illustrates the age and sex structure of a country's population and may provide insights about political and social stability, as well as economic development. The population is distributed along the horizontal axis, with males shown on the left and females on the right. The male and female populations are broken down into 5-year age groups represented as horizontal bars along the vertical axis, with the youngest age groups at the bottom and the oldest at the top. The shape of the population pyramid gradually evolves over time based on fertility, mortality, and international migration trends.
context_page_description: The Royal Government of Bhutan listed the country's population as 752,700 in 2003.
  One explanation for this discrepancy [what discrepancy?] is that the higher CIA numbers ultimately trace back to an inflated population number the Bhutanese government supplied to the United Nations in the early 1970s in order to gain entry into that body. According to this theory the CIA population experts have retained this original inflated number year after year while adjusting it each year for normal population growth.
  An alternative theory is that the western and central districts of the country wish to underestimate the populations of the southern and eastern districts in order to maintain their historical dominance over those districts. This is the claim made by some Bhutanese refugee groups. Certainly the government numbers do not include people, that were living in the refugee camps in Nepal and other persons forced out of Bhutan, which total approximately 125,000, majority of whom have now resettled in the USA.
  The Bhutanese numbers can be reconstructed from their 9th Five Year Plan documents, which lists the exact number of households in each gewog.
context_section_description: The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
caption: Population pyramid 2016
exif: {}