STATE OF WORLD POPULATION 2002

USEFUL FACTS

 

 

Population

 

Since 1960:

In developing regions, fertility has been cut in half, from 6 children per woman to 2.9. Contraceptive prevalence has increased from 10 to 62 per cent of women, and life expectancy has increased from 48 to 64 years.

In the least-developed countries, fertility has declined only from 6.6 children to 5.2, and life expectancy increased to just over 50 years from roughly 39.  (Though countries with high levels of HIV/AIDS have lost their earlier gains.)

Global population today it is 6.2 billion, twice what it was in 1960.

 

By 2050:

Global population will reach 9.3 billion by 2050.

 

The less-developed regions will add 3.2 billion (going from 4.9 to 8.1 billion) – the same number as were added between 1950 and 2000.

 

Family planning programmes and population assistance encourage lower fertility, accounting for almost one third of the global decline in fertility between 1972 and 1994.

 

Long-term demographic and economic data from 45 developing countries show that high fertility increases poverty by slowing economic growth and by skewing the distribution of consumption against the poor.

 

Slower population growth has encouraged overall economic growth in developing countries. Since 1970, developing countries with lower fertility and slower population growth have seen higher productivity, more savings and more productive investment.

 

The effects of programmes on fertility were particularly strong in Asia, accounting for more than two thirds of the decline. They were intermediate in Latin America and the Arab States and weak in Africa.

 

Declining fertility in Brazil in the last 50 years contributed an additional 0.4 to 0.5 per cent in the annual growth of per capita income, which grew on average by nearly 3 per cent per year. The demographic transition had a direct impact on poverty, accounting for an estimated 15 per cent of the impact of economic growth. Mexico and other countries in Latin America have registered similar effects.

 

 

 

 

Demographic Window

 

Half of the improvement in economic growth attributable to population factors has come from fertility decline and half from mortality declines.

 

A fall of 4 per thousand in the net birth rate would translate into a 2.4 per cent decline in those living in absolute poverty in the next decade.

 

Asia

The effects of the demographic window could be seen in the “Asian tigers” of the 1980s and 1990s: While the proportion of their working-age populations (15-60) started to increase as late as the mid-1970s, the pace of change was extremely rapid up to the early 1990s. The relative growth of working-age populations in these countries will continue for another decade. These countries made the supporting investments in health and education early in the development process, and created a framework for more open markets and social participation.

 

South Asia is approaching the window’s peak.  It will reach its peak ratio of working-age to dependent-ages between 2015 and 2025.

 

Latin America

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the relative increase in the working-age population started at least five years earlier than East Asia, but the proportional change has been less marked. Change has been slower, especially among the poor; their progress in health and education has not been shared at all income levels.

 

In Brazil, 25 per cent of those born in 1970 are poor. If fertility levels had stayed as high they were early in the century, this would have been 37 per cent. The reduction in poverty is equivalent to what would be gained from a 0.7 per cent annual increase in per capita GDP.

 

Arab States and Central Asia

The countries of North Africa, and Western Asia and Central Asia are at a variety of stages in the demographic transition. Countries well into the transition must act soon to take advantage of their opportunity; others must quicken their transition to increase their opportunity.

 

Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa lags most. Half the population of sub-Saharan Africa is less than 17.6 years old. The working-age proportion of the population between 15 and 60 (50.9 per cent) is lower than it was in 1950 (52.5 per cent).

 

Only six of the 46 sub-Saharan African countries have populations with median ages as high as 20 years (the median age in more-developed regions is now around 36). By 2050, the regional median age will reach 26.4, lower than more-developed regions a century earlier. The working-age population will increase to 62.2 per cent by 2050. Only 11 countries are projected to reach their maximum working-age proportion prior to 2050.

 

Poverty

 

Three billion people live on $2 a day or less. This number is the same as additions to world population since 1960. Most growth is now in the poorest countries.

 

In the 1990s, the per capita GDP of developing countries grew by 1.6 per cent a year. But these slow gains were unevenly distributed. The per capita GDP growth of the poorest countries in the 1990s was slower than in the 1980s.

 

Lower-middle-income countries had poorer economic performance in the 1990s than the 1980s. Transitional and developing economies in Europe and Central Asia actually declined in the 1990s. In 1999-2000 GDP growth per capita in low-income countries in this region was 2.2 per cent per year. Similar rates held regionally in Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa. Sub-Saharan African per capita economic performance grew by only 0.6 per cent. While extreme income poverty declined in the 1990s, much of that was due to progress in a few countries in Asia.

 

The proportion of the population in developing countries living on less than $1 a day decreased from 28.3 per cent in 1987 to 23.4 per cent in 1998. The percentages reflect population growth; absolute numbers have remained relatively stable at about 1.2 billion.

 

The reduction in the number of people living on less than a dollar a day has been uneven across regions. The most dramatic reductions have taken place in East Asia, mainly China. The most dramatic increase has been in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There were net additions to the number of poor in both south Asia and Africa. Modest gains in poverty reduction were made in Middle East and Latin America.

 

The gap between rich and poor, globally and within countries, has been growing. The difference in per capita income between the world’s wealthiest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent was 30 to 1 in 1960; this ratio jumped to 78 to 1 in 1994, and decreased slightly to 74 to 1 in 1999.

 

An analysis of data for 53 countries between 1965 and 1990 found that higher adult survival rates were responsible for about 8 per cent of total growth. (A number reflected above as half the fifteen per cent due to population.)

 

 

Population living on less than dollar a day

(at 1993 purchasing power parity)

 

 

Note: In South Asia the relative decline in proportions poor was associated with an absolute increase of 50 million, in sub-Saharan Africa a modest relative increase resulted in 84 million more extremely poor people.  These increases were largely due to population growth.

 

Women

 

More women than men live in poverty. This disparity has increased over the past decade, particularly in developing countries.

 

The gender-poverty ratio is the number of women per 100 men in the poorest fifth of the population or living below the poverty line. Data from the early 1990s show this ratio ranging widely, from 93 in Nepal to 130 in Bangladesh and as high as 190 in Botswana.

 

There is greater gender inequality in social and economic rights than in legal and political rights, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Women in Eastern Europe and Central Asia experience the greatest relative equality and women in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa the least.

 

At least half of women’s total work time is spent on unpaid work.

 

Education

Women tend to be less educated than their husbands, the difference being greatest in South Asia and the smallest in Latin America. Women marry younger in South Asia and at older ages in Latin America.

 

If other regions had closed the education gender gap as fast as East Asia did from 1960 to 1992, per capita income could have grown by an additional 0.5 to 0.9 percentage points per year in sub-Saharan Africa, 1.7 per cent in South Asia and 2.2 per cent in West Asia.

 

In countries where girls are only half as likely to go to school as boys, there are on average 21.1 more infant deaths per 1,000 live births than in countries with no gender gap.

 

In sub-Saharan Africa, between 8 and 25 per cent of girls’ school dropout rates are the result of pregnancy.

 

Gender dimensions in development and programmes

Studies in Bangladesh found that participation in programmes that combine maternal and child health and family planning with poverty alleviation produce greater reductions in child mortality, particularly among girls, in the poorest groups compared to the richest groups. Combining the two programmes improved their effectiveness.

 

Reducing gender inequality can accelerate economic growth and have a powerful impact on poverty. Comparing East Asia and South Asia between 1960 and 1992, South Asia started with wider gender gaps in health and education and closed them more slowly. If gender gaps had closed at the same rate in the two sub-regions, South Asia would have increased its real per capita annual growth in GDP by 0.7 to 1.0 per cent.

 

A study of 44 developing countries showed that fertility is highest among the poorest and lower in wealthier groups. The better-off have fewer children than the poor, and they also are more likely to have only the children they want.

 

Risks

Early marriage does not protect young women’s health: pregnancy before the age of 18 is several times more risky than for a woman over 20.

 

Women in the poorest countries, and the poorest women within these countries, face a risk of death as a result of pregnancy up to 600 times higher than their better-off counterparts.

 

A study in Zambia revealed that only 11 per cent of the women interviewed believed that a married woman could ask her husband to use a condom, even if she knew that he had been visiting prostitutes and was possibly suffered from a sexually transmitted infection.

 

The poorest women start their childbearing earliest. In many developing countries, poor women marry and start bearing children between ages 15 and 19.

 

In some of the 22 countries reviewed in sub-Saharan Africa, adolescent fertility decreases with higher wealth; but where fertility is highest, fewer differences are seen.

 

Gender violence in the industrial countries alone, is estimated to cost one in five healthy years of life of women age.

 

Health

 

Poor people in a 41-country survey cited illness most frequently as the cause of destitution and the reason for a slide into poverty.

 

More than one fifth of the burden of disease among women of reproductive age is connected with sex and reproduction. In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is 40 per cent.

 

High prevalence of disease goes hand in hand with poor economic performance. Productivity losses from ill health could amount to roughly $360 billion per year in developing countries within two decades. In countries where a high proportion of the population is at risk of severe malaria, average income is less than one fifth that of non-malarial countries.

 

In the least-developed countries, life expectancy is just 49 years; it is 77 in high-income countries.

 

In the least-developed countries, one in ten children do not reach their first birthday. Infant mortality is 92 per 1,000 live births; it is 6 in high-income countries.

 

Unwanted children are more prone to respiratory and diarrhoeal infections than wanted children. Wanted or not, each additional sibling reduces the chance of a child receiving treatment by 2 to 8 per cent.

 

A woman’s lifetime risk of dying due to maternal causes (pregnancy, delivery and related complication) is:

• in Africa, one in 19;
• in Asia, one in 132;
• in Latin America, one in 188;
• in more-developed countries only one in 2,976.

 

Women in the slums have limited access to reproductive health information and care because health centres are not conveniently located. Combined with social norms this contributes to the fact that:

·         93 per cent of married teenagers have begun childbearing;

·         22 per cent of girls give birth before age 15;

·         63 per cent of women have never used a modern method of family planning;

·         40 per cent became pregnant unwillingly due to lack of knowledge of services.

 

Health gaps between rich and poor are generally wider in poorer countries than richer ones.

 

Gaps have harmful effects everywhere. In the United States, the country that spends the most on health care per capita in the world, inequalities in access to health care are higher than in other industrialized states. These disparities mean that overall health performance is worse; for example, infant and child mortality in the United States is higher than in most European Union countries. Child mortality levels in some poor communities in the US rival those of Panama.

 

RH gaps

Approximately 500,000 women die each year from maternal causes, and many times that number suffer illnesses and injuries associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Ninety-nine per cent of these deaths occur in developing countries.

 

Complications of pregnancy and childbirth are a leading cause of death and disability for women aged 15-49 in most developing countries.

 

Only 53 per cent of births are attended by trained practitioners, and access to emergency obstetric care is extremely low, particularly among poor and rural women. To save women’s lives, there must be a large increase in essential equipment and medications for safe delivery.

 

Family planning gaps

There is little difference in fertility between income groups in countries with fertility rates above six children per woman.

 

The higher the overall level of women’s contraceptive use, the lower the differential between women in the richest and poorest groups. The largest differentials are observed during the transition. Once family planning use exceeds 40-45 per cent overall, the differences between wealth groups narrows considerably, and family planning becomes accepted as the norm.

 

The use of family planning services depends less on cost than on personal motivation, spousal, family and community support and institutional commitment and resources for providing the services.

 

Resources for health

The poorest countries lack the financing or give higher priority to debt servicing and repayment, defence or industrial development.

 

Low-income countries are spending only $21 per capita per year for all forms of health care, much of it directed to expensive curative services to the detriment of basic health prevention and care. The WHO/World Bank Commission on Macro-economics and Health estimated that an additional $30 billion per year is needed.

                                                                               

In a majority of the countries, the richest 40 per cent receive a larger share of the total health outlays than the poorest 40 per cent.

 

In Viet Nam, for example, the poorest receive nearly their proportional share of reproductive health expenditures.  Policies can reduce inequality.

 

Projected needs

Demand for modern contraceptives will increase by over 40 per cent during the next 15 years as the result of unmet need, increased demand and growing populations of reproductive ages.

 

 

HIV/AIDS

 

HIV/AIDS is the deadliest and fastest spreading of the diseases of sex and reproduction. It poses a greater threat to development prospects in poor countries than almost any other disease.

 

On average, 14,000 men, women and children are infected daily. HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa and the world’s fourth-biggest killer.

 

More than 60 million people have been infected with HIV, and AIDS has already killed more than 20 million people.

 

An estimated 40 million people are living with the virus, over 28 million in Africa and almost 95 per cent in developing countries.

 

HIV/AIDS is the major cause of death in Africa. All but 1.5 million of the 40 million currently infected people live in developing countries. It is spreading fastest in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and is daily becoming a more serious threat in India and China. In 2001 three million people died of AIDS, out of 22 million the disease has killed. AIDS deaths have left 13.4 million children without one or both parents, a third of all orphans.

 

In the 1990s, AIDS reduced Africa’s per capita annual growth by an estimated 0.8 per cent. In two decades, economies of the worst-affected countries may be 20 to 40 per cent smaller than they would have been without AIDS.

 

Surveys in 17 African countries indicated that over half of the girls did not know any way of protecting themselves from HIV.  Cultural support for adolescent sex and poverty-driven interactions with older men put young women at greater risk.

 

More than 4 million children under the age of 15 have been infected with HIV. Over 90 per cent were infants born to HIV-positive mothers and acquired the virus before or during birth or through breastfeeding.

 

Of the 580,000 children under the age of 15 who died of AIDS in 2001, 500,000—nearly nine out of ten—were African.

 

Young women know less than young men, though young women are more vulnerable to infection. Half of all new HIV infections are among young people aged 15-24, and young women are more likely to be infected than young men their own age.

 

By 2010, about 40 million children worldwide will have been orphaned by the pandemic. The death of young working adults and the increase in widows, widowers and orphans will increase dependency as well as poverty.

 

Sub-Saharan Africa will have 71 million fewer people by 2010 than it would have had without AIDS. The result is to threaten the economies, social structures and political stability of entire societies.

 

Family farms in Zimbabwe see a 40-60 per cent fall in the production of maize, peanuts and cotton after an AIDS death.

 

Only about one in five people at risk for HIV have access to prevention information and services. Fewer than 5 per cent of people who need them get anti-retroviral drugs.

 

By 2020 African economies could be 20-40 per cent smaller than expected because of the pandemic.

 

By 1997, worldwide, 41 per cent of all HIV-positive adults were women. In 2001, the figure was over 47 per cent and in Sub-Saharan Africa, 55 per cent.

 

About a third of infected mothers pass the disease to their children in utero.

 

Educated mothers have healthier children. They know more about good nutrition, and there is less competition for food in smaller families. The combination accounts for 43 per cent of the reduction in child malnutrition between 1970 and 1995.

 

Education

 

Declining fertility in some countries is reducing the pressure on public school systems, providing an opportunity to increase quality without necessarily increasing expenditures.

 

When opportunities are available for educated workers, earnings can increase on average by 10 per cent for each additional year of schooling.

 

Globally, about 31 per cent of women were without any formal education in 2000, compared to 18 per cent of men.

 

Women in South Asia have only half as many years of education as men, and female enrolment rates at the secondary level are only two thirds of male rates. In sub-Saharan Africa, girls’ school attendance at age 12-13 is 80 per cent that of boys but by age 18-19, only half as many girls as boys are attending school.

 

Pregnancies contribute to as much as a quarter of school dropouts among girls who continue into their reproductive years in Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Increases in women’s education makes the greatest contribution to reducing the rate of child malnutrition, accounting for 43 per cent of the total reduction. Improvements in food availability came in a distant second, contributing 26 per cent.

 

Educated women are more likely to have adequate prenatal care, to have skilled assistance at the delivery of their babies, and to use contraception to avoid unwanted and mistimed births.

 

Studies have found that an additional year of female education reduces fertility by between 0.2 and 0.3 births per woman.

 

In South Asia and in West and Central Africa, a large minority of children from poor households never enrol in school. In Latin America, in contrast, virtually all children complete the first grade, but subsequent dropout rates are high.

 

A recent study of 35 countries in West and Central Africa and in South Asia showed that, in 10 countries, half or more of 15-19 year olds from poor households never completed grade one.

 

A larger percentage of public spending on education goes to government actions that benefit the wealthy (e.g., higher levels of schooling rather than basic education).

 

 

Resources

 

In 2000, total expenditure towards the goal of universal access to reproductive health by 2015 was $10.9 billion. Donor assistance totalled $2.6 billion. This is less than a quarter (24 per cent) of total expenditure, and less than half (46 per cent) of their commitment at the ICPD. Developing countries contributed $8.3 billion, 76 per cent of the total spent and about 73 per cent of their commitment. A few large countries account for much of this expenditure. Africa is the region with the largest share (70 per cent) of allocations coming from international sources.

 

UNFPA estimates that contraceptive requirements for family planning and prevention of STIs and HIV/AIDS call for total donor support in 2015 of $739 million, an increase of $405 million over 2000. These are a fraction of overall programme needs (commodities costs are only about a fifth of total service costs) and represent 40 per cent of total commodity costs.

Global indicators:

 

	Infant mortality per 1,000 live births	Life expectancy M/F	Births/ 1,000  women;  age 15-19	Total population (millions) (2002)	Total population (millions) (2050)
World total	55	63.9/68.1	50	6,211.1	9,322.3
More developed regions	8	71.9/79.3	27	1,196.0	1,181.1
Less developed regions	59	62.5/65.7	54	5,015.1	8,141.1
Least developed countries	92	50.6/52.2	127	692.2	1,829.5

 

Indicators related to various launch sites:

	Infant mortality per 1,000 live births	Life expectancy M/F	Births per 1,000 women aged 15-19	Total population (millions) (2002)	Total population (millions) (2050)
Japan	3	77.8/85	4	127.5	109.2
Denmark	5	74.2/79.1	7	5.3	5.1
Finland	4	74.4/81.5	7	5.2	4.7
Ireland	6	74.4/79.6