POPULATION GROWTH

• ALINE ISSA, PhD

 Population

• Population: number of people or

inhabitants in a particular region or
country
• Population growth is measured by the
difference between the number of
births and number of deaths.
Population
• Global population growth: Every
year, approximately 141 million
people are born and approximately
57 million people die.
• Therefore, around 84 million people
are being added to the world
population every year.
Population

• The main factors that affect population growth are

Health (which in Fertility

turn affects death)
 • Health has improved over the long run, resulting in a dramatic
decline in mortality rates in the world.
Population • As for fertility, socio-economic changes over the course of
modernization have contributed to a significant reduction in
fertility.
• Decline in child mortality
• Changes in the economy
• Education
• Availability of contraception
• Rise in the status of and opportunities for women
• Developed countries tend to have lower fertility rates than
developing countries.
Population

Up to that point, birth and

Beginning in the late 1700s,
death rates had been
death rates started to
relatively equal, regardless of
decline.
location.

A greater number of people

lived through their
adolescent years, increasing
the average life expectancy
and creating a new trajectory
for population growth.
 Life Expectancy
• Estimates suggest that in a pre-modern, poor world, life expectancy was
around 30 years in all regions of the world.
• In the 19th century, life expectancy started to increase in the early
industrialized countries while it stayed low in the rest of the world.
• Factors that contributed to the increase in life expectancy:
• Advancements in health and sanitation
• New technologies in agriculture and production
• Over the past 300 years, changes in the birth and death rates have
resulted in changes in population demographics within a country.
Life Expectancy
Life Expectancy Globally and by World Regions (1770-2015)

James Riley For Data 1990 And Earlier; WHO

and World Bank For Later Data (By Max Roser)
 Demographic Transition
• Demographic transition is the model that explains the
changing size of the total population as driven by two
demographic characteristics –birth rate and death rate– of
the population.
• As these rates change in relation to each other, their
produced impact greatly affects a country’s total
population.
• Within this model, a country will progress from one stage
to the next over time as certain social and economic forces
affect the birth and death rates.
• Every country can be placed within the demographic
transition model, but not every stage has a country that
meets its specific definition.
• For example, there are currently no countries in Stage
1.
• There are arguably few countries, if any, in Stage 5,
but there is potential for reaching this stage in the
future.
General note: A decline in death rate is followed by a decline in birth rate.
 Demographic Transition
Stage 1 Long ago, the birth rate was high, but the death rate was also high. Population size
remained fairly stable. This describes the reality throughout most of history.
Societies around the world remained in stage 1 for thousands of years.
Stage 2 With the introduction of modern medicine, health slowly starts to improve, so the
death rate starts dropping. However, fertility still remains as high as before. Families
do not yet adapt their fertility to the low mortality and continue to have many
children. Therefore, the population grows rapidly.
Stage 3 Fertility declines steeply as a result of socio-economic changes, and parents realize
that the mortality of children is not as high as it once was, opting for fewer births.
Therefore, population growth continues, but at a slower rate.
Stage 4 The birth and death rates are both low. These countries tend to have stronger
economies, higher levels of education, better health care, a higher proportion of
working women, and a low fertility rate. The result is a stable population.
Stage 5 What happens at a very high level of socio-economic modernization is still not clear.
It is assumed that fertility will start to rise again (but not to the high levels of pre-
modern times). As a result, the population growth rate will slowly increase. However,
other theories predict that the fertility rate will continue to drop and the death rate
will be higher than the birth rate, resulting in a decline in population.
Demographic Transition
Impact of population aging on food
security in the context of artificial
intelligence: Evidence from China

Chien-Chiang Lee, Jingyang Yan, Fuhao Wang (Technological

Forecasting and Social Change
Volume 199, February 2024, 123062)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2023.123062
Population Growth
• In the years following World War II, population grew fairly
rapidly, with a rate of growth that peaked in the late 1960s at
2.1% per year.
• Since then, population growth has gradually slowed, and the
number of people added annually has changed little.
• Every year sees the addition of about 84 million humans on the
planet.
Population Growth
World Population (1950-2014)

UNPD, Worldwatch Institute

Population Growth
Annual Growth Rate of World Population (1950-2014)

UNPD, Worldwatch Institute

Population Growth
• Having nearly tripled from 2.5 billion people
in 1950 to 7.3 billion in 2014, the human
population will continue to grow through
2070, according to two recent demographic
projections.
• After that, and depending on which of the
two projections more accurately forecasts
the future, the human population will either:
• Continue to grow into the next century
• Begin to shrink
 Population Growth
• The two population projections,

the other from the International

one from the United Nations
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Population Division (UNPD)
(IIASA)

agree on how population has grown until now

• However, their future scenarios about population growth are different.
Population Growth
World Population to 2100, Two Projections

UNPD, Wittgenstein Centre, Worldwatch Institute

Population Growth
• The United Nations Population Division (UNPD) demographers used
probabilistic projections, a methodology that applies past behavior and
expert opinion about the future to assign quantified probabilities to
various population outcomes.
• Based on this, in 2014, they claimed that there was an 80% likelihood
that the world population would grow from 7.3 billion people to
approximately 10.9 billion people in 2100.
• The U.N. analysts reported that the most likely long-term future is for
continued growth into the 22nd century.
Population Growth
• Demographers with the International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis (IIASA), had an opposing opinion.
• They have long used the probabilistic methodology, and foresee the
world population peaking around 2070 at 9.4 billion people and then
gradually shrinking to 8.9 billion by the century’s end.
Population Growth
• What explains the disagreement between these two respected groups
of population projectors?
❖Different assumptions, revolving mostly around two topics: the African
population and the future of education
• The U.N. demographers stressed that recent surveys have shown that
human fertility is not falling in a number of countries as earlier
projections had assumed they would.
• Most of these countries are in Africa, and the UNPD significantly
increased its earlier projections for that continent’s population.
• The new probabilistic projections gave an 80% chance that the African
population will rise from 1.2 billion today to somewhere between 3.5-
5.1 billion by 2100.
Population Growth
• The IIASA demographers, by contrast, focused not on recent fertility
trends, but rather more on educational ones.
• In every region of the world, including Africa, there are larger
proportions of young people enrolled in school, and these rates are
likely to continue to rise.
• Since high levels of education are associated with reductions in fertility,
the demographers reasoned that fertility, even in high-fertility countries,
is likely to fall more than current fertility trends.
• This different focus led in particular to opposing projected paths for the
population in Africa, with the IIASA projecting a population of 2.6 billion
by 2100 (in contrast to 3.5-5.1 billion projected by the UNPD).
Population Growth
Africa’s Population to 2100, Two Projections

UNPD, Wittgenstein Centre, Worldwatch Institute

Population Growth
• The differences in the two groups’ projections for other world regions
are less dramatic.
• Since education levels are already fairly high in the other world regions,
fertility has already fallen considerably in recent decades in the rest of
the world.
• Therefore, there is less division on where population in those regions is
likely to go.
Population Growth
The two groups’ best-guess projection for the population in 2100 in the
world’s major regions are as follows:
• For Asia, the UNPD projects 4.7 billion people in 2100, while IIASA
projects 4.4 billion.
• For Europe, UNPD projects 639 million, while IIASA projects 702 million.
• For North America, UNPD expects 513 million, while IIASA projects 520
million.
• For South America and the Caribbean, UNPD projects 736 million, and
IIASA expects 684 million.