In 2023, China will cede its place as the world’s most populous country to India. The region is facing a birth rate collapse that will accelerate population decline through 2050.
It becomes whiter and shrinks. Asia, home to almost 60% of the world’s population, is aging and having fewer children in the face of what some experts have dubbed the “Great Baby Crash”. Admittedly, next year India will overtake the most populous country in the world with 1.43 billion inhabitants and thus China with its 1.42 billion. According to United Nations forecasts, by 2050 there will be almost 1.67 billion Indians. This increase will also affect Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
But don’t be fooled by this development, because the demographic slowdown is very real. If the United Nations estimates that world population will peak at 10.4 billion in 2080, other demographers predict that scenario could happen as early as the late 2040s.
“The decline in the global fertility rate means there will be more than 14 million fewer babies in the world between 2022 and 2025 compared to UN projections, writes economist James Pomeroy in a substantiated study published in August by the HSBC banking group has been published. The impact could be much larger in the future, and falling fertility rates could see many populations halving for the rest of the century.” The expert clarifies that “the collapse in birth rates during the pandemic is one of the most significant things the have happened to the world economy in our lifetime”.
East Asia is already affected by this phenomenon. With a fertility rate of 0.81 in 2021, South Korea became the first OECD country to fall below the threshold of one child per woman in 2018. This is now also the case for Taiwan (0.97, see opposite), followed by China at 1.15 and Japan at 1.34. Far removed from the generation change with 2.1 children per woman. Projections by the National Institute for Demographic Studies for 2050 indicate a significant population decline in this region of the world: minus 110 million in China, minus 20 million in Japan, minus 6 in Korea and minus 2 in Taiwan.
China will be affected by colossal changes due to its population size. Two and a half years ago, twenty experts from the University of Chicago published in The Lancet a study showing that the country could lose half its population by the end of the 21st century. This is despite abandoning the one-child policy in 2016 and introducing aid and incentives for a third child five years later. A real demographic crash.