UN / New report: By 2050 there will be 9.3 billion people in the world
Claudia Arnstein, D. Welt
India is one of the six countries responsible for the significant increase in the world's population
The United Nations has increased its estimate of the future size of the world's population to almost half a billion, this is because the birth rates in the developing countries are not decreasing at the expected speed. UN data predicts that by the year 2050 there will be 9.3 billion people on Earth. The information appears in a report published every two years by the UN Population Division. The update for the year 2000 was presented yesterday in New York.
Katrina Hinz from the German Foundation for World Population, based in Hanover, believes that the data will affect the growth rate of the world's population only in the distant future.
The world population now stands at 6.1 billion people, and is growing by 77 million every year. "At the same time, the gap between the industrialized countries and the developing countries is widening," says Thomas Buettner, a population expert at the United Nations. Six countries in the world - India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Indonesia - are responsible for about 50% of the increase in the world's population. In 39 industrialized countries, on the other hand, the birth rates are lower than the 2.1 children per woman, which are necessary to maintain the constant size of the population. The size of the populations in these countries in 2050 will be much lower than their size today.
This is the first time that the UN has taken into account the effects of immigration on the size of the population in industrialized countries. The population of these countries would have started to decrease in 2003, if not for the influx of immigrants entering them. The decrease in the size of the population has actually been postponed, thanks to immigration, until 2025. Boettner says that these projections are based on the immigration data updated for today, and do not take into account possible changes in immigration patterns.
The average age of residents of industrialized countries continues to rise, despite immigration. For the first time, more residents over 60 than children under 14 live in these countries. Half of the European population is older than 37.5; by 2050, the median will be 49.5 years. Spain will then be the European country with the oldest population.
Globally, the number of people over the age of 60, which currently stands at 606 million, will increase by 2050 to almost two billion. By then, the world will also have close to 400 million residents older than 80 - five times more than today. 3.2 million people will be older than 100 years old. Japan will have the largest number of people aged 100 and over. These changes will cause far-reaching social changes.
Life expectancy in industrialized countries is now 75 years. The developing countries are expected to reach the same life expectancy by 2050. At the same time, this number will be five years lower in the 45 countries where the AIDS disease has hit the hardest. Despite the rapid spread of the disease, the populations of these countries in 2050 will be larger than they are today.
Only in South Africa is the birth rate expected to be too low to compensate for the increase in the death rate from AIDS. The UN estimates that a decrease in the size of the population there will be reflected between the years 2010 and 2025.
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 1/3/2001{
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