How the World Will Look in 2050

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 2, 1999 | by Sands David R.

India next year will join China in the exclusive 1 billion population club, ushering in a new century in which growth rates in the developing world soar while the number of people in industrial democracies fall.

"The next 100 years will determine how the world looks," says Carl Haub, coauthor of a new survey by the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau. "No matter what happens, Europe's population looks set to remain at best perfectly flat while there will be heavy population growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Political power could very well shift with it."

According to the survey, the world's population is expected to pass 6 billion by the end of 1999 -- just 12 years after hitting 5 billion. Africa, with 13 percent of the world's population, will see 34 percent of the globe's population increase during the next 50 years. (The average woman in Niger will bear 7.5 children during her life; by comparison, the average woman in Italy averages under 1.2 children.) India and China combined will account for another 25 percent of the increase.

The result will be an increasingly elderly population in countries such as Italy, Germany and Japan and an increasingly young population in African and Asian countries. "In the more developed countries, one in five persons may be under the age of 15, while in some developing countries the ratio is closer to two-thirds," says Diana Cornelius, who helped write the report. "By far the greatest potential for growth will be in the high-youth countries."

The dry population numbers help explain the dynamics behind Yugoslavia's violent campaign targeting ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. There were 21 births per 1,000 people in Kosovo according to the latest statistics, compared with just 11 per 1,000 people in Serbia itself. The Serbian population in Kosovo was becoming an ever-shrinking minority in the province.

The projected population patterns for the 21st century will be sharply different from those for the 20th. World population was below 2 billion around 1900, and the population in the more developed countries doubled during the next 100 years. By contrast, "it is likely that Europe's population will decline throughout the coming century," according to the new report.

The U.S. fertility rate is below the replacement rate of 2.1, compared with 3.8 children for the nondeveloped world and 5.8 children for sub-Saharan Africa.