How the dearth of babies will affect the global economy

The world’s population is going to peak before the century is out and then enter into a big decline, putting serious pressure on economic growth, according to a new study.

Schoolchildren in Kenya © BSIP SA / Alamy Stock Photo
It might soon be time to welcome more people in
(Image credit: © Alamy)

What’s happened?

A major new study of global population trends was published in The Lancet last week, by researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. It forecast that the number of people in the world will peak around 2064 – far earlier than expected – and will never be as big as demographers had previously assumed. This is due, in large part, to their assessment that fertility levels will fall faster than previously predicted, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and other less developed countries. The IHME’s central forecast is that, having peaked at 9.7 billion, the global population will fall to 8.8 billion by 2100, about a billion higher than it is now, and then continue falling. That compares with a prediction of 10.9 billion in 2100 by the UN’s Population Division, the most widely used forecast of global population growth.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.