- Stephanie Hegarty
- Population Affairs Correspondent
3 hours ago
A crowded street in Delhi
India is set to become the world’s most populous country next year, surpassing China with a population of 1.4 billion, according to United Nations figures.
By next November, the planet will be home to eight billion people.
But population growth is not as fast as it used to be.
It’s now at its slowest rate since 1950, and is set to peak, the United Nations says, around 2080 at regarding 10.4 billion people, although some demographers believe that might happen sooner than that date. .
But the world’s population is increasing unevenly.
More than half of the growth we will see in the next 30 years will occur in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania.
Meanwhile, some of the world’s most advanced economies are experiencing population decline with fertility rates falling below 2.1 children per woman, which is known as the “replacement rate”. The report says the population in 61 countries will decline by at least 1% by 2050.
And with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world (1.15 children per woman), China has announced that its population is set to start declining next year, much earlier than previously thought. This is despite the state abandoning the one-child policy in 2016 and offering incentives for couples to have two or more children.
As India’s population continues to grow, it is almost certain to overtake China as the country with the largest population in the world.
Fertility rates are declining globally, even in many countries where populations are expanding. This is because, as the number of members of previous generations expands, there are more people who have children, even if these people have fewer children than their parents.
The growth is also largely thanks to advances in medicine and science, which mean that more children live to adulthood, and more adults into old age. This pattern is likely to continue, meaning that by 2050, global life expectancy will be around 77.2 years.
But this pattern means that the proportion of the world’s population aged 65 years, or more than 10% this year, is expected to rise to 16% in 2050. Again, the distribution will be uneven with some countries, in the eastern Asia and Western Europe, more extremes in aging.
