Global population upheaval grows

The world is going through huge population upheavals with no end in sight this century.
Europe and east Asia are ageing, while developing countries across Asia and sub-Saharan Africa – with relatively young populations – could reap a so-called “demographic dividend”.

The impact of families in the developed world having fewer children has already started to ripple through society. The working-age population has started to peak, particularly in those countries that have good healthcare provision.
For developed nations, the question of how affordable this is has never been so pressing.
Yet for countries such as India and Indonesia, whose working age populations are set to climb until the middle of the century, the challenge is to provide their growing workforce with jobs. India will have almost 1.1bn people aged 15-64 by 2050, according to the UN Population Division, 320m more than today.
Other nations face the prospect of supporting their ageing citizens.
By 2050, more than half of Japan’s population and 40 per cent of Russia’s will be over 50. For a multitude of reasons, Russia’s population has been shrinking since the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, sub-Saharan Africa’s population is booming. The UN predicts Nigeria will be home to more than 900m people by 2100, and could start to rival China as the world’s second most populous country behind India. While Nigeria’s fertility rate (defined as the number of children born to each woman) is likely to stay above the so-called replacement rate of 2.1 throughout the 21st century, fertility rates are falling across other sub-Saharan African countries.

FT