The United Nations recently released an updated version of its population projections through 2050 which slightly increased the expected population for its low, medium and high scenarios. Its new projects would have world population reaching almost 7.9 billion by 2050 under the low projection, 9.3 billion under the medium variant, and 10.9 billion under its high variant. Each scenario represents a drastic break in population growth — if current population growth rates were to remain constant, the world’s population would top 13 billion in 2050.
Why the upward revision of a few hundred million people? Primarily because previous projections underestimated birth rates in India, Nigeria, Bangladesh and other regions.
There are a number of interesting implications in the report. Except for the United States, population growth is no longer an issue for Western industrialized nations. Rather than worrying about their population growing, nations from Great Britain to Italy to Japan will have to grapple with the fact that their populations will decline, in some cases substantially, by 2050 if the UN projections turn out to be correct.
Meanwhile the developing world’s population will continue to explode — the number of people living in the 48 poorest nations of the world will see their population triple by 2050 (which is an interesting counterfactual to the common claim that all populations, even human populations, inevitably grow when they have surplus resources).
While Western industrial nations will see their population decline, they will also see their population age as the number of people over 60 and 80 years of age grows rapidly. The median age for people living in Africa, for example, will be about 27.4 by 2050, whereas in North America it will reach 41 and in Europe it will reach an astounding 49.5.
The United States is the oddball nation within Western industrial countries since although its population will age, it will also continue to grow to close to 400 million people by 2050. Some of that growth is due to the United States’ relatively liberal immigration policies, but as Nicholas Eberstadt points out, even if you leave the immigration issue aside, America’s birth rates are significantly hire than birth rates of demographically similar European nations.
ALthough AIDS will continue to afflict the developing world, killing tens of millions of people by 2050, the epidemic in Africa and elsewhere won’t be able to slow population growth anywhere except perhaps subSaharan Africa. In fact nations that have some of the highest AIDS infection rates in the world, such as Botswana and Zimbabwe, will see their populations soar thanks to very high fertility rates.
‘Nine billion people by 2050’. The BBC, February 28, 2001
Against a trend, U.S. population will bloom, U.N. says. Barbara Crossette, The New York Times, February 28, 2001.
World confronts an aging population. John Dillin, The Christian Science Monitor, March 1, 2001.