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Centenarians, foreigners on rise in Swiss census

The mix of Swiss people, like those pictured at this open air festival in Crans-sur-Nyon in 2011, is growing older and more foreign Keystone

The number of Swiss residents who have lived longer than a century rose by 4% last year, highlighting a population that is not only growing but growing older.

One in five women and one in six men is older than 64, according to provisional data issued on Thursday by the Federal Statistics Office.

Just 0.02% of the population – some 1,600 long-lived people – has managed to become centenarians. Those 1,300 women and 300 men represent a near-doubling from 787 over the past 15 years.

“Based on assumptions about future mortality trends, it’s estimated that 23% of girls born in 2014 and 15% of boys born the same year will become centenarians,” the office said in a statement.

At the end of 2014, Switzerland had a permanent resident population of 8,236,600. There were about 100,000 more women than men.

The population rose by 96,900 or 1.2% from a year earlier. Almost two-thirds of the increase was due to foreign nationals.

In all there were 1,998,200 foreign nationals, or 24.3% of the permanent resident population. Most are between the ages of 25 to 49, or an average age of 37 years for foreigners versus 43 for the Swiss. Of those residents without a Swiss passport, around a fifth were born in Switzerland.

All 26 Swiss cantons shared in the population growth. The largest increases were in Fribourg, Geneva, Zug, Vaud, Valais, Zurich, Aargau and Thurgau, which all rose by more than 1%. Uri had the least growth, which was 0.4%.

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SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR