According to a UN report, the world’s population grew by less than 1% a year for the first time since the aftermath of World War II in 2020 and 2021 and Europe’s total population fell by reality during the coronavirus pandemic.
The population of 61 countries is projected to decline by at least 1% between 2022 and 2050, and the associated low fertility rates will also be combined with better health care to accelerate the aging of societies.
As the figures were published in the UN World Population Prospects report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres focused on the benefits of health care rather than declining fertility and went to praise the “advances in health that have extended life and drastically reduced maternal and infant mortality rates.”
However, the increase in the proportion of older people in many countries is expected to affect economic growth and public finances and is already posing growing political challenges.
Despite the slowdown in growth, the world’s population is still poised this year to reach the 8 billion mark, while next year India is expected to surpass China as the most populous country. The world’s population is expected to peak in the 2080s at 10.4 billion and then begin to fall, the first decline predicted in the UN annual report.
Europe’s population fell by 744,000 in 2020 and by 1.4 million last year, the biggest drop on any continent since records began in 1950, reflecting an increase in deaths, a falling births and lower net migration linked to the pandemic.
However, the pandemic “is not the main factor,” said John Wilmoth, director of the population division of the UN department of economic and social affairs. The fertility rate “has been quite low in almost every European country for many decades and that means there are not many young people,” he said.
The European population is expected to continue to contract until 2100, and Germany and other countries are joining an already established trend in Eastern and Southern European countries such as Poland and Italy.
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Two-thirds of the world’s citizens live in a country where the fertility rate is less than 2.1 births per woman, about the level needed for populations to remain stable if mortality rates are low.
In countries with a declining population “unless you get a miracle of productivity, overall economic growth will fall,” said Charles Goodhart, professor emeritus at the London School of Economics and co-author of The Great Demographic Reversal.
In Asia, the Japanese population has been declining since 2010, that of South Korea fell in 2020 and that of China is expected to do the same this year. China’s population is projected to decline by about 6 million a year by the mid-2040s and about 12 million a year by the end of the 2050s, the world’s largest decline.
“If you look at a world map of countries that will decrease population size, it basically starts in Central Europe and goes east to Japan through Russia and China,” Wilmoth said.
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Africa overtook Asia in 2020 to become the main source of population growth. The UN reports that more than half of the projected increase by 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries, most in Africa, with rapid growth threatening its development goals. Nigeria by the middle of the century is expected to be as populous as the US, closing the current 121 million gap between countries.
More production “could and should” be moved to Africa, Goodhart said, “because the alternative, mass emigration to other countries where the population is falling, will not be politically viable.”
“It is mainly the aging and shrinking working-age population that affects a country’s economic development,” said Martina Lizarazo López of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a think tank based in Germany.
According to experts, increased productivity, automation and longer working lives can help reduce the impact of population aging.
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Worldwide, more than 1 billion people will be over the age of 65 in 2030 and 210 million people over the age of 80, about twice as many as in 2010. Older people already make up about a quarter of the population of many countries such as Japan, Italy and Germany.
Joshua Wilde, a scientific researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, said that if fertility rates dropped at a rate when the population declined, “it’s actually fantastic because you have a higher share of the population in working age groups “. But “in the long run,” he said, “all those workers who are giving a boost to per capita income will retire and need pensions, they will need health care.”