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Earthing

The document summarizes how the global population pyramid has changed from 1950 to today and projections for 2100. In 1950, the pyramid shape showed a high mortality rate throughout life, with many children born and 1 in 5 dying before age 5. From 1950 to 2018, improvements in health led to a narrowing at the top and increasing population size. Projections show fewer children being born by 2100 but continued growth of working age and older populations, resulting in a more box-like shape indicating low mortality and longer lifespans. This represents a shift to a healthier global demographic structure.

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22 views

Earthing

The document summarizes how the global population pyramid has changed from 1950 to today and projections for 2100. In 1950, the pyramid shape showed a high mortality rate throughout life, with many children born and 1 in 5 dying before age 5. From 1950 to 2018, improvements in health led to a narrowing at the top and increasing population size. Projections show fewer children being born by 2100 but continued growth of working age and older populations, resulting in a more box-like shape indicating low mortality and longer lifespans. This represents a shift to a healthier global demographic structure.

Uploaded by

ykraroki
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ourworldindata.

org

The global population pyramid: How


global demography has changed and
what we can expect for the 21st
century
by Max Roser

4-5 minutes

In 1950 there were 2.5 billion people on the planet. Now, there are
more than 8 billion. By the end of the century, the UN expects a
global population of around 10.4 billion. This visualization of the
population pyramid makes it possible to understand this enormous
global transformation.

Population pyramids visualize the demographic structure of a


population. The width represents the size of the population of a
given age; women on the right and men on the left. The bottom
layer represents the number of newborns and above it, you find
the numbers of older cohorts. Represented in this way the
population structure of societies with high mortality rates
resembled a pyramid – this is how this famous type of visualization
got its name.

In the darkest blue, you see the pyramid that represents the
structure of the world population in 1950. Two factors are
responsible for the pyramid shape in 1950: An increasing number
of births broadened the base layer of the population pyramid and a
continuously-high risk of death throughout life is evident by the
pyramid narrowing towards the top. There were many newborns
relative to the number of people at older ages.

The narrowing of the pyramid just above the base is testimony to


the fact that more than 1 in 5 children born in 1950 died before
they reached the age of five.1

Through shades of blue and green the same visualization shows


the population structure over the last decades up to 2018. You see
that in each subsequent decade the population pyramid was larger
than before – in each decade more people of all ages were added
to the world population.

If you look at the green pyramid for 2018 you see that the
narrowing above the base is much less strong than back in 1950;
the child mortality rate fell from 1-in-5 in 1950 to fewer than 1-in-20
today.

In comparing 1950 and 2018 we see that the number of children


born has increased – 97 million in 1950 to 143 million today – and
that the mortality of children decreased at the same time. If you
now compare the base of the pyramid in 2018 with the projection
for 2100 you see that the coming decades will not resemble the
past: According to the projections there will be fewer children
born at the end of this century than today. The base of the future
population structure is narrower.

We are at a turning point in global population history. Between


1950 and today, it was a widening of the entire pyramid – an
increase in the number of children – that was responsible for the
increase of the world population. From now on is not a widening of
the base, but a ‘fill up’ of the population above the base: the
number of children will barely increase and then start to decline,
but the number of people of working age and old age will increase
very substantially. As global health is improving and mortality is
falling, the people alive today are expected to live longer than any
generation before us.

At a country level “peak child” is often followed by a time in which


the country benefits from a “demographic dividend” when the
proportion of the dependent young generation falls and the share
of the population of working age increases.3

This is now happening on a global scale. For every child younger


than 15 there were 1.7 people of working age (15 to 64) in 1950;
today there are 2.6; and by the end of the century, there will be
3.6.4

Richer countries have benefited from this transition in the last


decades and are now facing the demographic problem of an
increasingly larger share of retired people who are not part of the
labor market. In the coming decades, it will be the poorer countries
that can benefit from this demographic dividend.

The change from 1950 to today and the projections to 2100 show
a world population that is becoming healthier. When the top of the
pyramid becomes wider and looks less like a pyramid and instead
becomes more box-shaped, the population lives through younger
ages with a very low risk of death and dies at an old age. The
demographic structure of a healthy population at the final stage of
the demographic transition is the box shape that we see for the
entire world in 2100.

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