If UN estimates are right, world population between 2000 and 2050 will grow by 47%, from 6,070,581,000 to 8,918,724,000, a difference of 2,848,143,000. This represents an average annual growth rate of less than 1%, much less than previous figures that brought to mind Malthusian scenarios. It does not necessarily involve felicitous trends. These estimates are full of surprises, some with important political implications.

It has been known for a long time that low birth rates accompany high economic development and population ageing. Conversely, poverty breeds high fertility rates. But these seemingly immutable demographic tendencies must be nuanced.

Of the 36 lowest placers in the UN Development Index, fifteen are expected to at least triple their population from 2000 to 2050 and of these high-population growth countries seven of them are among the ten least developed. Over the total of countries in the world today, the variables affecting demography are too many to be able to establish an exact co-relation between economic development and population, but the tendency for the poor to multiply faster seems indisputable. This trend becomes astonishing in the cases of Congo, Ethiopia, and Uganda, all three very poor countries, which, according to UN demographers, will by 2050 be among the seventeen most populous nations on Earth, Ethiopia and Congo in the 9th and 10th places, respectively. Of the three, only Ethiopia was among the first fourteen in 2000.

The tendency for populations either to stagnate or decrease is more difficult to co-relate to development in a straightforward sense, although explanations are sometimes upfront. Some African states--Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe--are expected to have drops in population, in the millions in the case of South Africa. This has to do with the spread of the AIDS pandemia. Among very poor countries, Cuba is also anomalous in probably going to experience, under present or similar political conditions, a slight population drop. Cuba has the largest per capita rate of abortions in the world. Cubans use an euphemism for abortion called "legrado", as I am going to be "legraded". Cuban sexual mores are quite liberal. Due to the scarcity of condoms and other contraceptive means, abortion in Cuba has become a sort of female rite of passage. Another Latin American "country" expected to have some population loss is Puerto Rico, a very Hispanic American dependency which has always exported its unemployed to the USA.

What will happen when there are as many Palestinians as Israelis?

Among developed nations, population decrease to the year 2050 will be notable in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Slovenia, and Spain. The Czech Republic, Estonia, and Latvia are part of a subgroup, constituted by ex-communist states, whose populations are falling dramatically. The group also includes Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, and Ukraine. In 2000 among the ten most populous countries, Russia is expected by 2050 to have dropped out altogether from the list of the seventeen most populous states. The statistical problems here are of two natures. Among ex-communist states the highest ranker in human development is Slovenia, in 29th place, so that the correlation social and economic development-population loss does not hold for the subgroup. One can ask without much hope for an answer why communism should have left a sequel of infertility?

In another category, the two richest nations in the world, Luxembourg and the United States, are expected to have considerable (and obviously relative) population-growth rates from 2000 to 2050; and among other large European states, the UK will experience demographic growth and France (a perennial symbol of infertility) is also expected to increase its population by some millions. Germany will have only a relatively small population decrease. Like Russia, it will lose its ranking among the seventeen most populous states (12th in 2000), but it will not experience anything like the dramatic demographic collapse of Japan (from 127,034,000 to 109,722,000 inhabitants).

The trend towards demographic growth in the UK and in France probably originates in the relatively high proportion of Muslims in those countries. Pakistanis in the UK, Algerians in France, and Turks in Germany are not there in their vast majority as illegals. They were invited in, to use the German expression, as "guest workers" (Gastarbeiter). Many if not most of these immigrants eventually became economically indispensable and have been allowed to assume the nationality of their country of residence. However wide the cultural gaps, the force of numbers presages that sooner or later there will be "mixing" in the widest sense of the term.

If economic growth continuous in countries with decreasing population, then the tendency for mixing will become not a phenomenon specific to some countries but a world-wide trend. It is not difficult to foresee that Japan, which will have a net loss of more than 17 million inhabitants, but whose economy is not, as was once feared, fated to be in a permanent state of stagnation, will require immigration on a massive if dosaged scale.

The Philippines, a "specialist" in the export of foreign workers (including entrepreneurs and professionals), will probably compensate the Japanese shortfall, as it now supplies guest workers in the millions to numerous countries in the world. The Philippines, whose population from 2000 to 2050 is expected to grow by over 51 million, might be showing the way that low-development, high-fertility states might possibly follow in the future. These general circumstances are the result of solid statistical trends and not of transitory conditions. In other words, the "economic refugee" of American immigration policy might become the inevitable legal norm in developed nations in the not so distant future.

One regional case in which population trends will inevitably have a political impact, whatever the relation of forces might seem to indicate in the present, is Israel/Palestine. Whereas Israel will have a population growth of nearly four million inhabitants (from just over six million to just under ten), the population of Occupied Palestinian Territories (to use the UN designation) will rise, always according to UN estimates, from 3,191,000 to 11,114,000 inhabitants. This results in a difference of only somewhat over a million between Palestinians and Israelis, but these figures must be placed in the context that geographically Israel is three times larger than Palestine and that it has expanded, and might continue to try to expand, into formerly exclusively Palestinian territories. It is true that more than half of Israel is desert, but tiny Gaza, in which 1.2 million Palestinians are stuffed, is also arid and the entire country of Jordan, with five million inhabitants, is a desert.

The "Philippinization" of the world

If military strength and unconditional American support can permit six million israelis to dominate 3,191,000 Palestinians today, it is inconceivable that it will be able to go on doing so as the population density of Palestine continues to increase. At the very least a modus vivendi different from the present one will have to be worked out at some time in the ongoing future, more likely gradually than through dramatic "breakthrough" negotiations and agreements.

The following is a comparative table of the seventeen most populous countries in 2000 (those with more than 60 million inhabitants) and which the first seventeen might be in 2050 if present rates of population growth and economic realities do not experience unlikely dramatic somersaults:

As can be seen, Russia, Germany, and Turkey drop out from the first list to the second whereas Congo, the Philippines, and Uganda come crashing into the second list. Although population drop is not necessarily the crucial indicator, Russia and Turkey will be probably be gaining in development what they lose in population. On the other hand, of the three newcomers only Philippines (at least from the perspective of the present) possesses the likelihood of economic growth and economic opportunities overcoming the handicaps of extreme poverty. In fact, if our previous comments about Filipino overseas workers hold true, it might be possible to speak of a Philippinization of the world, at least in the sense of the tendency towards ethnic and cultural mixing. But if in the Philippines itself extreme fertility rates are not curtailed what is gained by one hand will be squandered by the other and the result will not be the Philippines as a supplier of talent and services to the world but as a parasite on the wealth of other countries.

There are other potentially significant changes in these two lists. Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Pakistan gain ranking while Brazil loses and México, Vietnam, and Iran retain their positions or drop slightly. If the general patterns of development and population apply here, then the latter group of countries is likely to perform well economically, which is nothing intriguing about any of them. Brazil has the most noticeable downwards demographic change. On almost any macro-economic and sector index Brazil has a developed economy. It only seems to lag in per capita GDP. Brazil is very ethnically diverse. If the world trend towards mixing becomes strong in Brazil, and it is difficult to foresee why it shouldn't, then this country just might, solely on the interpretation of demographic trends, become another one of those that are breaking or have broken the bonds of transitional to full development.

Finally, we have the cases of China and India. By 2050, in these estimates, China should have ceded the place of the largest nation in the world to India. Chinese economic growth in the last decade has been nothing short of sensational. India's has been steady but unspectacular. However, in 2003 India outgrew China and the bets are on that it will go on doing so. If India becomes the economic dark horse of Asia, then it should also relent in its tendency to high population growth. But in China birth control is a rigid official policy and in India it is not. This means that, however strenuously one can argue for the low population-high economic performance relation, it is still only roughly indicative given the numerous variables that affect both sides of the ledger.