India Vs. China: The Population Race

1. Currently, India’s annual population growth is more than two times greater than China’s.

2. Over the next decade, India will add an average of 15 million people per year. This compares to less than four million per year for China.

3. Between 2015 and 2025, India will account for 21% of the whole world’s average annual population increase of 72 million.

4. India’s current population of 1.3 billion is nearly as large as the combined population of the world’s high-income countries (as classified by the World Bank).

5. Remarkably, these 80 “rich” countries will add only about 4.9 million annually to their combined population over the next ten years — or just one-third of India’s annual population increase.

6. Over the next ten years, the combined population of the United States and Canada is expected to grow by 2.6 million people per year.

7. In Europe, annual population growth has already flattened to nearly zero and is expected to be slightly negative within about six years.

8. China’s population as a whole is projected to begin shrinking in the late 2020s, just over a decade from now.

9. China’s labor force is already beginning to shrink. Due to the increase in life expectancy in China, the effect of fewer births on the overall population level is somewhat delayed.

10. India will retain positive population growth until the late 2060s under current projections.

Data source: 2015 projections by the United Nations Population Division. Data analysis by The Globalist Research Center.