Fewer babies will be born in all of Europe than in Nigeria alone.
In Europe, “at the rate at which things are going, the population will have halved before 2070, with the continent at risk of losing 400 million inhabitants by 2100,” noted James Pomeroy, an economist at China’s HSBC bank.
The growth of the world population has already reached its lowest rate since 1950 and Europe’s population will continue to contract until the end of the century, noted the Financial Times, citing the United Nations World Population Prospects report.
A collateral question is: where?
In the next four minutes 1,000 children will be born: 172 in India, 103 in China, 57 in Nigeria, 47 in Pakistan — but in all of Europe, only 52.
India, next year, is expected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country. India will also be 20% Muslim as well as the world’s largest Islamic community. How will this demographic trend impact the fragile coexistence between Muslims and Hindus?
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In 2021, Europe’s population shrank by 1.4 million, the largest decline on any continent since 1950, when these rates were first recorded. Two-thirds of the world’s people live in a country where the fertility rate is below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. China’s population is projected to decline by 6 million per year in the mid-2040s and by 12 million per year by the end of the 2050s, the largest slump ever recorded in a country’s history. China’s population will halve over the next 45 years and it will become a very old country: its GDP will contract as never before and society will have to manage an aging population it never before encountered.
Japan’s unprecedented aging is having a frightening impact on its military. Since 1994, the number of young people between 18 and 26 — the age for recruitment — has been dwindling. Between 1994 and 2015, there was a fall off of 11 million, or 40%. “Japan no longer has people to wage war,” wrote Forbes. For the first time, the Japanese bought more diapers for adults than for babies. The same holds true for South Korea. “The decline in births in South Korea has become a challenge to national security,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 2019.
Read more: Gatestone Institute
