World population to reach over 9 bln by 2050

The world population will grow from 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion people by 2050, UN demographers forecast. Meanwhile, the population of industrially developed countries will remain practically unchanged at 1.2 billion, and the population of countries under development will increase to 7.8 billion people, a report of the UN Population Division in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the UN Secretariat said on Thursday. At present four from each ten people in the world live in India and China. The population in India will exceed the population in China (1.7 billion people) to make more than three billion people in 20-25 years. These two countries will make for a half of the world population by 2050.

The world population keeps getting older. People aged 60 and over made eight percent of the world population in 1950, this figure made ten percent by 2005, and will double to 22 percent in 45 years.

Meanwhile, the lifespan growth slowed down in Europe in the late sixties and practically stopped in the late eighties. This tendency is mainly caused by a steep reduction in the lifespan from 67.2 years in 1960 to 66.6 in 2005 in Eastern Europe, and primarily in Russia and Ukraine.

Demographers stressed the tendency for the reduction of the population in 51 countries and regions, including Germany, Italy, Japan, Baltic states and CIS states. The Russian population will reduce from 143 to 111 million people by 2050, and the Ukrainian population from 46 to 26 million, respectively. Meanwhile, if the population in Western Europe is reducing over the birth rate decrease, and in former Soviet republics over the death rate growth, deterioration of social and economic conditions and the malign impact of the AIDS epidemic. Demographers forecast that the lifespan reduction will stop in Russia in ten years and will grow to 68.2 years on average by 2025 and to 72.9 years by 2050.

ITAR-TASS
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