Population Of Asia
The fact that the population of Asia is now over four billion people means that sixty-percent of the population of the world lives in Asia. The continent also consists of forty-seven countries and 17,212,000 square miles of land, making it the largest of all the continents. Right now, China has the largest population of the Asian countries but by the middle of the 21st century, they will be overtaken by India.
The population of Asia is spread across the continent according to its topography and climate. Because it has so many extremes in temperatures, weather conditions and land formations, some areas are heavily populated while others are uninhabitable. The population of Asia doubled in the twentieth century and urbanization has increased dramatically over the same time period. During the next fifty years, cities with one to five million people will decline while cities that now have ten million people will increase.
The United Nations keeps world population statistics and predicts the growth of the world population. They tell us that between 1995 and 2050 there will be 3.68 billion people added to the world’s population. The greatest part of this increase is in the population of Asia, which will grow by two billion people. Most of this growth will occur before 2025, and then the pace will decline between 2025 and 2050.
The ten countries that will have the highest population growth over the next thirty years are (in order) India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, United States, Bangladesh, Zaire and Iran. The highest growth country, India, will in fact increase their population by 1.18 billion people in the one hundred years between 1950 and 2050. They will surpass China in overall population.
The growth in the population of Asia will be led by India and not China. While back in the 1950s both China and Asia had a total fertility rate of 6 children per woman, China’s had decreased to 2.4 by 1990, while in India the fertility rate was still high at over four children per woman. Between the years 1995 and 2050, India’s population is going to increase to 1.9 billion people.
Over the next several decades, the population of the world is going to increase dramatically, but so is the age of the current population. Statistics indicate that there were 131 million people worldwide over the age of 65 in 1950. In 1996, that number was at 371 million. By the year 2050, there will be 1.4 billion people over the age of 65 throughout the world. Asian countries will account for a large portion of this increase with the Chinese elderly rising dramatically in numbers.