According to the UN's latest World Population Prospects, released on Thursday in New York, there will be 1,395m people in India in 2025 and 1,593m in 2050. In China the population will grow to 1,441m by 2025, before dropping to 1,392m in 2050. Cheryl Sawyer, a UN demographer, said: “We've been saying for a while that India would cross over China before 2050. But the crossover has been getting earlier and earlier and we now say it will happen before 2030 (not including Hong Kong). This is five years earlier than we said two years ago.
“Based on analysis of the newest censuses, we're estimating lower fertility for China, while India's is slightly higher than we estimated in the past.”
In 2050, the world's population is expected to be 9.1bn people, up from 6.5bn now, with almost all the growth in developing countries. The numbers vary significantly according to differing scenarios and become less certain the further they project into the future. Demographic shifts depend on fertility, mortality and migration, which can be influenced by policy and social and economic trends.
The UN's population division said it did not doubt that India and China would exchange places, mainly because of differences in fertility. The only question was exactly when. China now has a fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman (though rising to 1.85), while India's is just above three.
Thomas Buettner, the chief of the UN division's estimates and projection section, said China's changing population was due to “modernisation and uprooting people from traditional lifestyles into the modern economy”, where “people have other opportunities that compete with having large families, like consumerism, travel and education”.
He said it was also due to a rigid population policy, although Chinese officials had started thinking about relaxing that policy because of concern about rapid ageing of the population. Europe's population, which recently underwent a reversal in growth, is also on a downward trend. According to a medium variant, it will drop from 728m now to 653m in 2050. That figure (which incorporates Russia but not Turkey) includes falls in Italy and Germany, although France and the UK will grow.
Japan's population declines from 128m to 112m, according to the same variant. “The population of developed countries as a whole is expected to remain virtually unchanged between 2005 and 2050, at about 1.2bn,” the report says. “In contrast, the population of the 50 least-developed countries is projected to more than double.”
The population of India will overtake that of China before 2030, five years earlier than expected, a United Nations population report predicts.
