# Hands-On: Calculating South America's population growth with Alphacast
Hands-On: Calculating South America's population growth with Alphacast
Read more Alphacast Highlights here
South America - Demographics
Alphacast allows you to unlock the details of South America's demographics with ease. Uncover essential data and showcase trends through captivating charts, including insights into the region's most populous countries and those experiencing rapid population growth.. Data is from World Bank.
But that's not all. The World Bank data only shows you how population growth evolved in Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole. But not specifically in South America. That's not a problem because with Alphacast you can compile the data in a few steps by building South America's population growth.
Let's calculate South America's population growth with Alphacast
Step 1: Our starting point is Demographics - Global - World Bank - Demographics. Up to here, just press on Select columns and choose South American countries and the variables "Population, total" and "Population growth (annual %). Finally use the Transform Data option, that will direct you to create a pipeline.
Countries:
Variables:
Step 2: For the following calculations, it is necessary that each column represents a different country, so the Long to Wide option should be used. In the entity to convert just select "Country" and use the previously selected variables for the values in the columns.
Step 3: To achieve the final objective, we need to know what was the weighting of each country in each year of the series. That is, how much was the percentage of the population of the country "A" in the total population of South America in the year "X". In mathematical words: (population of country "A" / total population). With 2 simple calculations, we will get it.
Calculation 1: use Calculate Variable to sum all the populations of the countries and get the total population of South America.
Calculation 2: use Apply formula to divide the populations of the countries over the total population and get each weighting (apply formula, in this case, it is a useful tool to save time and not to do division by division). Now we will see new columns indicating the weighting of each country in each year. The columns will be identified by the "Weighting" at the end of the column name.
Step 4: Now we are in a position to do the final step: calculate the weighted population growth of South America. To do this we must again select Calculate variable and sum the multiplication of the weight of each country (columns ended by "Weighting") with its population growth.
And here's the final result!
