WASHINGTON (AP) — Japan and more than a dozen European countries are likely to lose population in coming decades even while global growth accelerates, population experts say.
The chief reason: Many young people in poorer nations lack the incentives that cause the crowded Japanese and Europeans to limit family size.
In an annual assessment of global trends, the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research organization, said Tuesday that world population, which began the century at 1.6 billion, will hit 6 billion before New Year’s Eve, 2000.
The United States, riding a wave of prosperity and still with plenty of space to accommodate new families, is outpacing much of the industrial world in population growth, demographer Carl Haub told a news conference.
While U.S. population is projected to rise from its present 270 million to nearly 298 million in 2010 and 335 million in 2025, the populations of Germany, Russia, Italy, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania will show no natural growth, the bureau said. Deaths in all those places outnumber births.
As a consequence, among the biggest countries, Russia is projected to go from 147 million people now to 135 million in 2025. Germany will drop from nearly 83 million today to 76 million in 2025.
Italy will decline from today’s 58 million to 55 million in 2025.
The United Kingdom will see slow growth — from today’s 59 million to nearly 63 million in 2025. And Japan, with 126 million people, will climb slightly by 2010, then decline to 121 million by 2025.
In terms of ranking, the world’s four largest nations — China, India, the United States and Indonesia — will retain those places in 2025, the bureau said. Pakistan will move into fifth place, displacing Brazil.
Here are the projections for others among the world’s most populous countries: Pakistan, now the seventh largest, will jump to fifth in 2025.
Russia, now sixth, will fall to 10th place in 2025. Pakistan will rise from seventh place today to fifth. Japan, now eighth, will drop to 11th.
Moving up will be Bangladesh, from ninth place now to eighth in 2025, while Nigeria will rise from 10th place today to seventh in 2025.
And Mexico, in 11th place now, will rise to ninth in 2025, with a better than 40 percent increase in population.
Projecting far ahead, Haub said the chief determining factor in the rate of global growth in the next century and a half is whether couples choose to have two or three children.
If families average slightly above two children per couple — enough for each pair of adults to replace themselves — the world’s population will stabilize around 10 billion by 2150, he said.
But if the childbearing average is 2.5 children per couple, the population would be enormously larger by that time — closer to 27 billion, he said.
“When we ask what the future size of world population will be, we are really asking how many children today’s youth will have,” he said.