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QuickFacts by Topic

Education
Employment
Environment
Family Planning
Fertility
Gender
Health
HIV/AIDS
Immunization
Income/Poverty
Marriage/Family
Migration
Mortality
Older Population
Policy
Population Trends
Race/Ethnicity
Reproductive Health
Urbanization
U.S. Census 2000
Youth

Education

June 2001:
How is HIV/AIDS affecting schooling in Africa? The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS says that AIDS is reducing the number of children in schools in the countries in Africa that are most affected by the epidemic. A few factors account for the decline. According to UNAIDS, women who are infected with the virus have fewer children and up to a third of the children born to these women are themselves infected and may not survive to school age. Children who have been orphaned by AIDS may be forced to abandon their schooling because there is no money available to send them or because they have to start earning a living.

As HIV/AIDS kills workers at all levels of the workforce in African countries, teachers are also seriously affected. A 1999 UNICEF survey in Malawi found that the rate of HIV infection among teachers was 30 percent. UNAIDS notes that in Zambia, teachers are increasingly dying of AIDS, while many more go to work only sporadically because they are ill. (For more, see UNAIDS' Report on the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic, June 2000.)

June 2001:
Education highs and lows among the foreign-born in the United States. Public policy initiatives often stress education as a means of guaranteeing a well-paid, productive population. In general, a person with a college degree earns more money and has more employment opportunities than a person with only a high school degree or less. This is of particular concern to immigrant communities. U.S. Census Bureau figures for 1998 show that persons born in the United States are more than twice as likely to have completed high school compared with the foreign-born.

By contrast, the percentage of native- and foreign-born persons with college degrees is almost identical. In fact, foreign-born persons are slightly more likely to have college degrees. This reveals a dichotomy within the immigrant community: One group is highly skilled and college educated, and can expect to compete with native-born persons for well-paying jobs, while the other group consists largely of less educated migrant workers.

This dichotomy among the foreign-born is evident when we compare educational attainment among persons of Hispanic and Asian descent. More than 40 percent of Asians finished four years of college, compared with only 11 percent of Latinos. Hispanics are about twice as likely as blacks and three times more likely than whites to drop out of high school. (For more information, go to PRB's AmeriStat website.)

June 2001:
Afghanistan's gender gaps in literacy. The gap in male-female literacy in Afghanistan offers a striking illustration of women's marginal status in that country. While the inequalities in education are significant within South Asia as a whole, the situation in Afghanistan is especially dramatic. Within South Asia, almost twice as many men as women can read and write. In Afghanistan, nearly three times as many men as women are literate. Some 46 percent of Afghan men and a tiny 16 percent of women can read and write, according to The State of the World's Children 2000, a report of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

In this largely rural, war-torn country of nearly 27 million people, men are expected to outlive women. The average girl born today in Afghanistan is expected to live to a meager 44 years, two years less than her male counterpart, according to the Population Reference Bureau's 2001 World Population Data Sheet. This is one of only a few cases in which male longevity is greater than that of females.

In the meantime, the gap between male and female literacy has widened. The difference, which was 27 percentage points in the 1980s, grew to 32 percentage points in the 1990s.

Employment

August 2001:
Is it common in the United States for mothers of preschoolers to be in the work force? Not only has the number of women in the U.S. labor force tripled over the last 40 years, the proportion of working mothers of young children has more than quadrupled. While American women were entering the labor force well before the turn of the last century, it is only during the last 30 years that the employment of mothers of preschoolers — including infants — has become common. Today, almost two-thirds of mothers of preschoolers and, even more strikingly, married mothers of children under age 1, are in the work force.

June 2001:
How visible are women in the workforce globally? Around the world, women are entering the workforce as never before, both because they want to and because they need to earn independent incomes. In times of economic difficulty, women's economic contribution to the household budget and the family's well-being increases. The International Labour Organization (ILO) says that women's participation in paid work has increased significantly since the beginning of the 1980s. In fact, women are now more than 40 percent of the global workforce, even though they continue to be concentrated in low-paid, low-skilled jobs. (See the Population Reference Bureau's report, Conveying Concerns: Women Report on Families in Transition, and the ILO's Decent Work for Women: An ILO Proposal to Accelerate the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action.)

March 2001:
Women's labor force participation in the Middle East and North Africa. Despite the growing number of women seeking employment in the Middle East and North Africa, the labor force participation of women in this region still remains the lowest in the world. The women's share of the labor force increased from 22 percent in 1980 to 27 percent in 1997. Outside of this region, women comprise at least one third of the labor force. In the Middle East and North Africa, the employment of women is mostly concentrated in the services sector, as is the case with men.

As a result of its high level of fertility in the recent past, the working-age population is growing rapidly. Women are also staying in school longer and an increasing number of them go off to college. These women then compete for already scarce jobs. Women, particularly younger women, often experience more unemployment and for longer periods than men. According to the United Nations, the unemployment rate among women in North Africa is 24 percent, the highest for any region for both men and women. In a number of the region's countries, young women with college degrees face a higher rate of unemployment than women with high school or lower education. In Jordan in 1996, the unemployment rate among women graduated from two-year community college was as high as 38 percent.

Sources: United Nations, The World's Women 2000, Trends and Statistics; International Labor Organization, World Employment Report 2001: Life at Work in the Information Economy.

Environment

June 2001:
Does the relationship between population and the environment vary by world region? Yes. When most people link population growth and environmental degradation, they are usually referring to less developed countries, where most of the world's people live and where population growth is high. But environmental problems exist in all countries, regardless of the level of development.

Most of the environmental degradation in industrialized countries, where only 20 percent of the world's people live, is attributable to high consumption patterns, according to the Population Reference Bureau report, Human Population: Fundamentals of Growth and Change. Each individual in an industrialized country exerts more pressure on the environment than perhaps 20 to 30 people in the less developed world, notes the report. For example, consumption patterns in the United States are indicative of the industrialized world's disproportionate use of global resources. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population, uses an estimated 33 percent of the world's resources, and causes an estimated 33 percent of the world's pollution. According to one estimate, the average person living in the United States uses at least 30 times the amount of resources as a person living in India.

June 2001:
How close is the coast? The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that about 60 percent of the world's population live within roughly 60 miles of the coastline. UNEP's Global State of the Environment Report 1997 says that more than 3 billion people rely on coastal and marine habitats for food, building sites, transportation, recreation, and waste disposal.

At the same time, says UNEP, about one-third of the world's coastal regions are at high risk of degradation, particularly from land-based sources of pollution and infrastructure development. European coasts are most affected, with some 80 percent at risk, followed by Asia and the Pacific, with 70 percent of the coast at risk. In Latin America, some 50 percent of the mangroves are affected by forestry and aquaculture activities. Oil spills are particular threats in West Asia and the Caribbean, while infrastructure development for the tourism industry puts stress on natural coastal areas around the world, particularly in small-island developing states.

June 2001:
What percent of the world's people live in urban settings? The world has experienced unprecedented urban growth in recent decades. In 1900, some 14 percent of the world were urbanites, and 12 cities had 1 million or more inhabitants. 4By 2000, about 47 percent of the world's population lived in urban areas (about 2.8 billion), and there were more than 400 cities with more than 1 million people, according to the Population Reference Bureau report, Human Population: Fundamentals of Growth and Change. More developed nations were about 76 percent urban, while 40 percent of residents of less developed countries lived in urban areas.

Urbanization is occurring rapidly in many less developed countries, notes the report. It is expected that 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030, and that most urban growth will occur in less developed countries.

An urban area may be defined by the number of residents, the population density, the percent of persons not dependent upon agriculture, or the provision of such public utilities and services as electricity and education. Some countries define any place with a population of 2,500 or more as urban, while others set a minimum of 20,000. There are no universal standards, and generally, each country develops its own set of criteria for distinguishing urban areas. The United States defines urban as a city, town, or village with a minimum population of 2,500 people. The classification of metropolitan includes both urban areas as well as rural areas that are socially and economically integrated with a particular city.

February 2001:
Where is desertification most severe? Desertification is generally viewed as an advanced stage of land degradation. The United Nations defines desertification as a destruction of the biological potential of the land that can lead to desert-like conditions. Desertification is most severe in Africa. Some 45 percent of Africa's population lives in drylands that are susceptible to desertification, according to the UN Development Program's Office to Combat Desertification and drought (www.undp.org/seed/unso). In Kenya, a three-year drought has withered crops and killed livestock, leaving thousands of people without adequate food supplies. In neighboring Tanzania, widespread tree felling threatens to transform much of the country's forest into desert. Fire is a primary cause of desertification in the Sahel region of North Africa, where the degradation of drylands is especially pronounced. (For more information, see "Africa's Struggle with Desertification," on PRB's website.)

Family Planning

June 2001:
How large is the "unmet need" for contraceptives? Experts estimate that between 100 million and 150 million women in the less developed world have an "unmet need" for contraceptive methods. These estimates, contained in the Population Reference Bureau report, New Population Policies: Advancing Women's Health and Rights, are based on surveys that include questions about women's reproductive intentions. Demographers define a woman as having an unmet need if she says she would prefer to avoid a pregnancy but is not using a contraceptive method. In some countries, more than one-quarter of married women of reproductive age have an unmet need for methods of family planning.

March 2001:
The contraceptive revolution. Fifty-two percent of the world's married women now use modern contraceptive methods, according to the Population Reference Bureau. China's contraceptive prevalence rate-83 percent-is the highest in the world. In Brazil and Thailand, 70 percent of married women use modern contraceptive methods. This high percentage has been achieved through increased information about reproductive health.

Other high-use countries include Germany (79 percent), Belgium (74 percent), Denmark (74 percent), the United States (71 percent), and the Netherlands (71 percent). More than 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have contraceptive prevalence rates below 10 percent. PRB's Population Bulletin, "World Population Beyond Six Billion," notes: "Women's options improved immensely when the pill and the modern IUD became available after 1960. During the 1990s, about 20 percent of women worldwide relied on one of these two methods. New contraceptives, including injectables and implants, became available in many countries in the 1980s. They have become popular methods in some African countries. Female sterilization has been widely adopted in Asia and Latin America and is the most popular single method worldwide. An estimated 17 percent of married women ages 15 to 49 rely on female sterilization to prevent pregnancy."

Fertility

March 2001:
Cuba's low fertility. Low fertility rates are usually linked to wealthy countries. But there are notable exceptions. Take the case of Cuba.

Cuba's average birth rate per woman (1.6) is the lowest in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Population Reference Bureau. It is also the same as that of the industrialized countries of Belgium and the Netherlands and falls below the 2.1 average in the United States.

A number of factors may contribute to this. For one thing, despite the country's battered economy, many indicators for Cuba compare favorably with those of wealthy countries. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) ranks Cuba 58th in the world in its 1999 human development index, a ranking of 174 countries, based on life expectancy, education, and income. In its gender empowerment measure, which focuses on women's opportunities, the UNDP ranks Cuba 21st in the world. Among developed nations, Japan is ranked 38th and France, 36th.

Life expectancy for Cuban boys and girls combined (75 years) is the same as that of more developed countries as a whole. Also, Cuba's literacy rate for women, ages 15 and over, is 95 percent. For every 100 males in secondary school, there are 105 females, according to PRB's 1998 Women of Our World.

March 2001:
How does population growth differ between developed and developing countries? The birth rate in developing countries is more than double that of developed countries. This phenomenon will have untold economic, political and environmental ramifications in the years ahead. Virtually all population growth in the foreseeable future is expected to take place in developing countries, while some developed nations could lose population, according to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). A key measure is the total fertility rate (TFR), or the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. A comparison between Niger, the country with the highest birth rate, 7.5 children per woman, and Bulgaria, with one of the lowest birth rates, 1.2 children per woman, illustrates the gap. (See PRB's 2001 World Population Data Sheet.)

March 2001:
What caused Sweden's "roller-coaster fertility" between 1975 and 1998? Sweden's roller coaster fertility rates from 1975 to 1998 illustrate why demographic projections cannot be taken for granted. Sweden's total fertility rate (TFR) fell to 1.6 children per woman in 1978, one of the lowest TFRs of any modern state in Europe at the time, according to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). The country's TFR seemed on a relatively stable track.

In 1983, however, the TFR began a highly unusual sharp rise that brought it above the replacement level fertility of 2.1 children per couple in 1990. Then the rate peaked and fertility made a precipitous drop to 1.5, the lowest in Swedish history. The difference between a TFR of 1.6 and a TFR of 2.1 or greater, it should be remembered, is the difference between adding population and losing population. What happened? Two factors seem to account for the roller-coaster fertility. Changes in maternity laws in the 1980s gave working women paid maternity leave. And if a woman had a second child within two years, she again received full salary during maternity leave. Many women cashed in on the liberal provision in the 1980s.

Not only did the two-year provision lift fertility, but it also absorbed future childbearing by couples who just wanted to replace themselves with two children. In the late 1980s, the Swedish economy fell into a decline, a factor that discouraged women from having children. The public sector was cut back, leaving many women unemployed. It is ironic that a sudden increase in Sweden's fertility that garnered considerable attention at the time has crashed so soon. (For more on fertility rates around the world, go to PRB's DataFinder.)

March 2001:
Low fertility and aging labor markets. As many industrialized countries may be discovering, the consequences of declining birth rates are different for individuals than they are for society. Having fewer children and delaying childbearing may allow individuals more time and money to invest in each child's personal development. It may also mean having a better chance to attain a higher standard of living. For society, falling birth rates have led to aging populations and shrinking labor markets. In Europe, this imbalance has resulted in a natural decrease in the region's population, according to UN estimates. But other industrialized nations are looking to immigration to replenish the labor force. For example, the goal of Canada's current government is to increase immigration levels to about one percent of the population, or roughly 300,000 new immigrants a year.

Gender

June 2001:
Husbands and wives and the U.S. workforce. The U.S. Census Bureau shows that the Ozzie and Harriet model, in which the husband works and the wife stays at home, does not represent the typical family in today's U.S. workplace. In a more accurate portrayal of American families, Harriet would enter the workforce and might even earn more money than her husband. In married-couple households in which both husband and wife are employed, over 25 percent of women earned more money in 1999 than their husbands did the previous year. And in dual-earner households in which both the husband and wife are working full-time this number increases to 31 percent. (For more information, go to PRB's AmeriStat website.)

In the meantime, the gap between male and female literacy has widened. The difference, which was 27 percentage points in the 1980s, grew to 32 percentage points in the 1990s.

June 2001:
Do gender differences affect women's health? The different roles that women and men play in society and the relative power they wield vary from one country to another. However, almost everywhere, women face disadvantages relative to men in the social, economic, and political spheres of life, according to the Population Reference Bureau report New Population Policies: Advancing Women's Health and Rights. Where men are viewed as the principal decisionmakers, women often hold a subordinate position in negotiations about limiting family size, contraceptive use, managing family resources, protecting family health, or seeking jobs. According to the report, gender differences affect women's health and well-being throughout the life cycle:

Before or at birth, parents who prefer boys may put girls at risk of sex-selective abortions (where technology is available to identify the sex) or infanticide.
Where food is scarce, girls often eat last, and usually less than boys do. Girls may be less likely than boys to receive health care when they are ill.
In some countries, mainly in Africa, girls are subjected to female genital cutting. Adolescent girls may be pressured into having sex at an early age-within an arranged marriage, by adolescent boys proving their virility, or by older men looking for partners not infected with STIs.
Married women may be pressured by husbands or families to have more children than they prefer, and women may be unable to seek or use contraception.
Married and unmarried women may be unable to deny sexual advances or persuade partners to use a condom, thereby exposing themselves to the risk of STIs.
In all societies, women are more likely than men are to experience domestic violence. Women may sustain injuries from physical abuse by male partners or family members, and the fear of abuse can make women less willing to resist the demands of their husbands or families.

Health

June 2001:
How serious is the global TB threat? The World Heath Organization (WHO) estimates that one-third of the world's population is now infected with tuberculosis and new infections are occurring at the rate of one every second. Further, WHO estimates that unless effective action is taken, 35 million people will die from the disease between the years 2000 and 2020. TB now kills 2 million people annually.

"The global epidemic is growing and becoming more dangerous. The breakdown in health services, the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the emergence of multi-drug-resistant TB are contributing to the worsening impact of the disease," WHO explains. (See www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact104.html.)

June 2001:
Can the world improve food security? To meet a projected world food gap in the year 2020, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) estimates that cereal production must be increased by 40 percent. More than 800 million people, mostly in the developing world, are already chronically undernourished and the world population is projected to increase by more than 70 million annually during the 1995-2020 period. At the same time, rising incomes in poor countries will stimulate demand. As a result, to close the gap between production and food demand, developing countries will have to double their cereal imports, roughly 60 percent of which is expected from the United States, says IFPRI.

Before or at birth, parents who prefer boys may put girls at risk of sex-selective abortions (where technology is available to identify the sex) or infanticide.
Where food is scarce, girls often eat last, and usually less than boys.
Girls may be less likely than boys to receive health care when they are ill. In some countries, mainly in Africa, girls are subjected to female genital cutting.
Adolescent girls may be pressured into having sex at an early age-within an arranged marriage, by adolescent boys proving their virility, or by older men looking for partners not infected with STIs.
Married women may be pressured by husbands or families to have more children than they prefer, and women may be unable to seek or use contraception.
Married and unmarried women may be unable to deny sexual advances or persuade partners to use a condom, thereby exposing themselves to the risk of STIs.
In all societies, women are more likely than men to experience domestic violence. Women may sustain injuries from physical abuse by male partners or family members, and the fear of abuse can make women less willing to resist the demands of their husbands or families.

June 2001:
Another way to look at hunger. At roughly 826 million, the world's undernourished people outnumber the populations of every continent except Asia.

According to the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2000 published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 792 million people in 98 developing nations are not getting enough food to lead normal, healthy, and active lives. The FAO notes that in the world's industrialized nations and countries in transition (those in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union), an estimated 34 million children, women, and men are undernourished.

HIV/AIDS

May 2001:
What is the impact of the AIDS epidemic on young people worldwide? The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) calculates that half of all new HIV infections around the world occur among youth between the ages of 15 and 24. When children under the age of 14 are added, the total increases to 60 percent of new infections. According to UNAIDS, the vast majority of these young people live in less developed countries where AIDS is concentrated.

The context within which young people live influences their exposure to HIV. Among the most vulnerable groups are those who live on the edges of society, including orphans, refugees, street children, those who grow up in urban slums, or those who face isolation because of their sexual orientation. These young people often have limited access to education, health information, and health services. Some may increase their risks by selling sex to survive; others may be abducted and sold into the sex trade. Many take up injecting drug use and expose themselves to high HIV risks by sharing needles.

Immunization

June 2001:
Immunization … an ounce of prevention. Without immunization from the main vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, an average of three out of every 100 children born will die from measles, another will die from tetanus, another from whooping cough, and one of every 200 will be disabled by polio, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). (For more, see http://www.unicef.org/gavi/decade.htm.)

Some progress has been made in the global immunization efforts over the last couple decades. For example, while only 20 percent of children in sub-Saharan Africa were immunized in the early 1980s, roughly half had received vaccines by the early 1990s. In the Middle East and North Africa, immunization campaigns doubled coverage against the six main vaccine-preventable diseases, from 42 percent in the early 1980s to 84 percent a decade later. In South Asia, by the early 1980s, 28 percent of children were immunized against vaccine-preventable diseases. By the early 1990s, the immunization rate had almost tripled to 85 percent.

May 2001:
How close is the world to eradicating polio? Although polio is now history in more developed countries, the condition still devastates children's lives in some less developed nations. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) says that in 2000 alone, polio paralyzed around 3,500 children in 20 countries and infected hundreds of thousands more.

UNICEF says that a massive global campaign to eradicate polio may, however, succeed in its goal in the next couple years.

More than two thirds of the world's children under 5 years old-450 million-were immunized against polio in 1998 alone. UNICEF's State of the World's Children 2000 notes that in India that year, health workers and volunteers vaccinated 134 million children during national immunization days.

Even countries fighting wars have honored their commitment to immunize children. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, national immunization days, which have been held since 1998, have reached 96 percent of the children in more than two-thirds of the country.

Income/Poverty

March 2001:
How much does it cost in the United States to raise a child to age 17? According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, a family with a child born in 1999 can expect to spend about USD$160,140 (USD$237,000 when adjusted for inflation) for food, shelter, and other necessities to raise that child over the next 17 years.

Marriage/Family

June 2001:
Are more people in the United States choosing to be single? Over the past 30 years, the percentage of persons who have never been married has increased from about 22 percent to 28 percent, according to the US Census Bureau. The major increases in the never-married population have occurred among blacks. Between 1975 and 1999, the percentage of blacks who have never been married increased from 32 percent to 44 percent. And the percentage of blacks who are married declined from over 42 percent in 1975 to 32 percent in 1999. (For more information, go to PRB's AmeriStat website.)

June 2001:
How is "the family" defined? No single definition of "the family" captures the many forms of family units around the world. The question of who lives with whom and how large the family unit is varies among and within societies, according to the Population Reference Bureau's Conveying Concerns: Women Report on Families in Transition. Furthermore, new economic and demographic trends are rapidly changing family lifestyles and composition across the globe, breaking down traditional notions of women's and men's roles in the home.

While marriage between a man and a woman is widely seen as the first step in family formation, many other types of unions exist, including cohabitation, visiting, consensual, and homosexual unions. The majority of families, however, comprise mother and father and children, a mother and her children, or a childless couple, with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other kin living either close by or far away. (See, for example, Marian F. Zeitlin, Ratna Megawangi, et al., Strengthening the Family: Implications for International Development, Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1995).

June 2001:
How does the international community view the family? The United Nations has long recognized the family as the basic unit of society and has advocated policies for the support and protection of family members. The world community went a step further in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo. The Programme of Action on population and development that governments adopted there recommends that nations create policies for housing, labor, health, social security, and education to support family life.

The Programme also recommends that governments and other relevant institutions develop the means to monitor the impact of social and economic decisions and actions on the well-being of families, on women's status within families, and on the ability of families to meet the basic needs of their members. (For more, see the Population Reference Bureau's Conveying Concerns: Women Report on Families in Transition.)

February 2001:
Are more young Americans living with their parents today than they were in 1970? As a declining share of young adults in the United States choose married life, a greater share are living with parents or on their own, according to a Population Bulletin of the Population Reference Bureau. The Bulletin, "American Families", by Suzanne M. Bianchi and Lynne M. Casper, notes that the percentage of young men living in their parents' home was 57 percent in 2000, about the same as in 1970, while the percentage increased for young women, from 39 percent to 47 percent.

Migration

January 2001:
How much has the immigrant population increased in the United States over the last 100 years? A dramatic increase in the U.S. foreign-born population took place between 1970 and 1998 as a result of legislation passed in 1965 that relaxed immigration barriers. The foreign-born population increased from 9.6 million to 24.4 million. About a third of the current foreign-born population has arrived in the United States since 1990. Despite the recent rise, however, the percentage of the population that was born outside of the United States was lower in 1998 (9 percent) than at the turn of the century (14 percent).

January 2001:
Where are Palestinian refugees living? There are 3.8 million Palestinians registered as refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/me.html). Jordan has the largest share of the Palestinian refugees living within its borders: 1.6 million. The Gaza Strip holds the second largest Palestinian refugee population, with more than 825,000 people registered as refugees. Only one-third of the Palestinian refugee population lives in refugee camps. The Gaza Strip has the largest number living in camps: close to half a million.

January 2001:
Replacement migration. Falling fertility rates are forcing European countries to consider substantial replacement migration to revitalize their aging workforces. UN experts reckon that if Europe wishes to maintain its present (1995) ratio of older citizens to active workers, the European Union would need 135 million immigrants by 2025. Europe's population is expected to decline from 731 million in 2010 to 718 million in 2025. By contrast, Africa's population is projected to jump from 979 million to 1,290 million over the same period.

Compared with Europe, the United States maintains a more balanced age structure through immigration, which accounts for about 30 percent of the nation's annual population increase.

October 2000:
Immigration-A big contributor to recent Australian population growth. Australia's population has been expanding slowly since the late 1970s, with average annual growth of around 1.2 percent. Current trends indicate that, were it not for immigration, it would take more than a century for Australia to double its population. Much of the recent growth resulted from immigration, with newcomers contributing a substantial 41 percent of population growth from 1993 through 1998, according to Australian Demographic Statistics (September 1999).

Mortality

March 2001:
Japanese girls in the lead. Baby girls born in Japan today have a life expectancy of 84 years - the highest in the world. Life expectancy is considered a rough measure of a nation's health and economic environment. Girls in Switzerland and San Marino are right behind girls in Japan, with life expectancies of 83 years. Girls in Australia, France, Iceland, Martinique, Spain, and Sweden have life expectancies of 82 years. Boys in Japan, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland can expect to live to about 77-more years of life than any other males.

March 2001:
Counting the years: What a difference a century makes! Living to a golden old age in the early 1800s meant reaching your mid-twenties. Babies born in India in 1881, for example, could expect to live a mere 25 years, according to official Indian figures for that year. Life expectancy in the world's second most populous nation has risen about 60 percent in more than a century.

Babies born in the South Asian nation today could expect to live to 60 years, a little below the world average of 64 years, according to UN estimates. This sharp increase in life expectancy — much faster than it ever was in the western nations — is what actually caused the population "explosion" of the latter half of the 20th century.

December 2000:
Where is the healthiest place to live in the United States? The healthiest place to live, judging from death rates that take into account the age distribution of the population, is the state of Hawaii. Minnesota comes in second, followed by Utah, North Dakota, and Colorado. The District of Columbia has far higher mortality than any state, followed by Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee. In part, these geographic variations reflect the variation in the proportion of people of different races living in each state. Hawaii has by far the largest proportion of Asian Americans, who have the lowest mortality rates among American racial and ethnic groups, and the District has a high proportion of African Americans, who have the highest mortality rates.

Older Population

June 2001:
The age-dependency ratio. The demographer's age-dependency ratio-also called the dependency ratio-offers a quick, rough measure of a nation's social obligations and probable population trends. The age-dependency ratio is the ratio of persons in the so-called economically dependent ages (under age 15 and over age 64) to the population's "economically productive ages" (ages 15 to 64). In the developed world, 18 percent of the population is under 15 years and 14 percent is 65 years or older, according to the 2001 World Population Data Sheet, published by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). By contrast, in the developing world (excluding China), 36 percent of the population is under age 15, and 4 percent is ages 65 or older.

In Nigeria, for example, 44 percent of the population is under 15 years old and 3 percent is 65 years or older, according to PRB. The populous sub-Saharan nation needs schools, teachers, maternal health care, job creation, and the like to build a stable future. And when the pre-teen group reaches its childbearing years, the nation's population growth will receive still more momentum. Italy's population, on the other hand, is only 14 percent children and 18 percent older adults. The European nation must focus on supporting its retired population and on finding ways to maintain work-force strength as its demographic structure ages.

February 2000:
Low fertility and aging labor markets. As many industrialized countries may be discovering, the consequences of declining birth rates are different for individuals than they are for society. Having fewer children and delaying childbearing may allow individuals more time and money to invest in each child's personal development. It may also mean having a better chance to attain a higher standard of living.

For society, falling birth rates have led to aging populations and shrinking labor markets. In Europe, this imbalance has resulted in a natural decrease in the region's population, according to UN estimates. But other industrialized nations are looking to immigration to replenish the labor force. For example, the goal of Canada's current government is to increase immigration levels to about one percent of the population, or roughly 300,000 new immigrants a year. (The country accepted some 170,000 new immigrants last year.)

Policy

June 2001:
Which policies are most effective in reducing population growth? A range of policies and programs can work together to bring about lower population growth rates. At recent world conferences, governments reviewed national experiences and developed consensus agreements about the most effective approaches to stabilize populations. Among the most influential of these conferences was the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, which called for making family planning and reproductive health care universally available and recommended a range of measures to improve women's status.

Research studies have found that organized programs that make family planning information and services widely available have had a direct effect on lowering the number of children women bear. Less developed countries that have implemented successful programs have made a strong political commitment to culturally sensitive, conveniently located programs that offer users a variety of family planning methods. In some countries, programs in which female family planning workers visit women in their homes have brought about an increase in the use of contraception. In traditional societies, family planning programs are more successful when community leaders who have a strong influence on a group's decisionmaking and on individual attitudes, support them.

Social and economic advances have also been associated with lower population growth. In poor, agrarian societies, children may represent a family's future security, since many people depend on their children for household and agricultural work and for support in old age. As countries modernize and become more urban, couples tend to prefer smaller families. Making family planning services readily available can help translate ideas about smaller family size into reality.

Increasing the status of women is also associated with lower fertility. Many women, especially in less developed countries, have few choices in life outside of marriage and children and tend to have large families. Investing in women, by providing education, health, and other services, helps to widen their opportunities and reduce their dependence on children for status and support.

June 2001:
How easy is it to turn development policy into action? Recent world conferences have produced an array of recommendations for governments and private organizations. The Programme of Action from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo includes 16 chapters with 243 proposed actions that cover many aspects of population, health, gender equality, other areas of social policy, socioeconomic development, and the environment. Most governments set national priorities that reflect the needs they perceive to be most critical. And, given resource limitations in less developed countries, most governments can afford only limited actions. The poorest countries need support from donor agencies to make any progress at all.

The world is far from meeting the resource needs outlined in the Cairo Programme of Action. In 1994, the UN projected that in less developed countries and countries in transition to a market economy (such as in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union), population and reproductive health programs would cost nearly $17 billion annually by 2000 and $22 billion by 2015, in 1993 dollars. The cost estimate for 2000 included $10.2 billion for family planning programs (about double the amount spent in 1990), $6.3 billion for other reproductive health care (such as prenatal and delivery care as well as the prevention of HIV and other STIs), and another $0.5 billion for research and policy activities.

The Cairo Programme of Action called for one-third of the proposed spending to come from international donors, about the same proportion as in earlier programs. Generally, governments in less developed countries pay for most of the local costs of providing services; donors typically help pay for contraceptives and other supplies and technical services. Under the Cairo guidelines, the donor/ developing country breakdown would have translated to $5.7 billion and $11.3 billion, respectively, in 2000. In fact, UN estimates of 1997 spending showed that donor countries were providing only about $1.9 billion to $2.0 billion annually — one-third of the amount called for — and the less developed countries were spending about $7.7 billion from domestic resources. (See the Population Reference Bureau's Population Bulletin, "New Population Policies: Advancing Women's Health and Rights.")

Population Trends

May 2001:
How bilingual are Canadians? Canada's two official languages, English and French, are not spoken in equal numbers of homes, according to Statistics Canada. About 19.6 million Canadians (69 percent of the population) generally speak English at home, including 530,000 who speak another language. By comparison, 6.5 million Canadians (23 percent of the population) speak French at home, including nearly 200,000 who also speak another language. Just 134,000 Canadians speak both official languages at home. Of the Canadians who speak French at home, 90 percent (5.9 million) live in Quebec. (Statistics Canada, accessed at http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb, March, 2001)

May 2001:
What languages are spoken in Canadian and U.S. homes? In both the United States and Canada, a noticeable minority of residents does not speak the official language of their country. The 1990 U.S. Census found that 31.9 million Americans ages 5 and over (14 percent of the population) spoke a language other than English at home. In Canada, which has two official languages, a smaller percentage of the population speaks a different language at home. Statistics Canada shows that nearly 2.6 million persons (9 percent of the population) primarily speak languages other than English and French at home.

March 2001:
Population aging. Worldwide trends toward lower fertility and greater life expectancy have contributed to the phenomenon of "population aging." While the trend has been mainly associated with the industrialized countries of Europe and North America, less developed nations are certainly catching up.

Uruguay is an example. This South American country, where 91 percent of the population lives in urban areas, has a higher percentage of people 60 years and over than Canada and the United States, according a joint publication of the Pan American Health Organization, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the National Institute on Aging. "Aging in the Americas into the XXI Century" notes that 17.3 percent of the Uruguayan population fall into the 60 years and older category, compared with 16.5 percent in the U.S., and 16.3 percent in Canada.

March 2001:
Asia's multimillions. Only one world region has more than one country of over 100 million people. Asia can count China, with 1.2 billion people, India, with 1 billion people, and four other nations. Indonesia, Pakistan, Japan, and Bangladesh have all crossed the 100 million-mark, according to the Population Reference Bureau.

With the exception of the Middle East, every other major world region has just one country of this size. Europe has Russia, North America has the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean has Brazil, and Africa has Nigeria.

March 2001:
How quickly is Yemen's population growing? The United Nations projects that the total population of Yemen - a country with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world - will increase from 18 million in 2000 to more than 100 million by 2050. The UN projects that by mid-century, the country's population will still be growing at more than two-and-a-half percent a year, faster than any other country's projected growth rate. Yemen currently has one of the world's highest birth rates - an average of about 6 children per woman. While the birth rate is expected to drop by half in the next 50 years, Yemen's population will continue to increase rapidly way into the 21st century because the number of women of childbearing years will still be growing. The number of Yemeni women of reproductive age will increase from 3.3 million in 1995 to 9.5 million in 2025. (Sources: UN World Population Prospects: 1998 and 2000 Revisions)

March 2001:
How does population growth differ between developed and developing countries? The birth rate in developing countries is more than double that of developed countries. This phenomenon will have untold economic, political and environmental ramifications in the years ahead. Virtually all population growth in the foreseeable future is expected to take place in developing countries, while some developed nations could lose population. A key measure is the total fertility rate (TFR), or the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. A comparison between Niger, the country with the highest birth rate, 7.5 children per woman, and Bulgaria, with one of the lowest birth rates, 1.1 children per woman, illustrates the gap.

March 2001:
How quickly has Egypt's population grown over the last 30 years? With 68 million people, Egypt has about twice the number of inhabitants it did 30 years ago. By the year 2025, Egypt's population is projected to reach 95 million, according to the UN World Population Prospects: 2000 Revision. This high rate of population growth is due to a rapid decline in mortality (particularly infant and child mortality) and a slow decline in fertility. The total fertility rate in Egypt was 5.3 children per woman in 1980, and 3.4 in 1998, according to the 1998 Demographic and Health Surveys. Despite this fertility decline, the population is expected to grow because an increasing number of young women are entering their childbearing years.

Race/Ethnicity

March 2001:
What percent of the U.S. population is multiracial? The 2000 Census was the first that allowed people to mark more than one race. The Census Bureau added this option because of increasing rates of interracial marriage and the growing population-especially children and minorities-that identifies with more than one race. Of the 281.4 million people counted in the census, about 6.8 million (2.4 percent) identified with two or more races. About 4 percent of children were identified as multiracial, compared with 2 percent of adults. The most common multiracial combinations in the 2000 Census were white and American Indian and Alaska Native (1 million); white and Asian (868,000); white and black (785,000); and black and American Indian and Alaska Native (182,000). The multiracial population also included 3.2 million people-primarily Hispanic/Latino respondents-who reported "some other race" in combination with one or more other races.

March 2001:
How many "Cablinasians" are there in the United States? In 1997, after his 1997 Masters Tournament win, Tiger Woods coined the term "Cablinasian" to describe his white, black, Thai, Chinese, and American Indian background. The 2000 Census was the first that allowed people like Tiger to select multiple races, and results show that he is not alone. There were 10,672 people who reported a combination of white, black, Asian, and American Indian races. This may sound like a sizeable group, but it is only a small fraction (0.2 percent) of the total people who marked more than one race (6.8 million). And in the United States as a whole, only 1 person in every 26,370 reported this rare combination.

Reproductive Health

August 2001:
What are the largest health burdens for women in their reproductive years? Pregnancy and childbirth, including unsafe abortion, account for the largest health burden for women in their reproductive years. In addition to maternal causes, sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, are a major cause of disability and death among women worldwide.

June 2001:
How common is adolescent childbearing? Of the 15 million young women ages 15 to 19 who give birth every year, 13 million live in less developed countries, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute's publication, Into a New World: Young Women's Sexual and Reproductive Lives. Thirty-three percent of women in less developed countries give birth before the age of 20, ranging from a low of 8 percent in East Asia to 55 percent in West Africa. In more developed countries, about 10 percent of women give birth by age 20. However, in the United States, the level of teen childbearing is significantly higher, at 19 percent. Significant differences also exist between countries in the same region. For example, in Senegal, 43 percent of women ages 20 to 24 gave birth by age 20, compared with 70 percent in Mali.

Early pregnancy and childbearing are typically associated with less education and lower future income for young mothers.

June 2001:
How does contraceptive use vary among regions? Contraceptive use varies substantially by region and country. Only 13 percent of married adolescents ages 15 to 19 use contraception in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 55 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 11 percent of married adolescents in Haiti use contraception, compared with 51 percent in Colombia. Turning to Asia, 7 percent of married adolescents use contraception in India, compared with 42 percent in Indonesia.

Urbanization

March 2001:
Judging a country by its cities. Since employment opportunities and access to education and health care are often limited in rural areas, the degree of urbanization within countries could help explain some inequalities across the region.

There is evidence of this in the Pacific. With its large forest cover, Papua New Guinea is one of the least urbanized territories in the world. A mere 15 percent of the population live in areas considered urban, according to the New Caledonia-based Secretariat of the Pacific Community, a regional grouping of 26 countries and territories. The Solomon Islands are even more rural. Only 13 percent of the population live in urban centers. In Australia and New Zealand, by comparison, 85 percent of the population lives in cities.

Gaps in life expectancy — one important measure of a population's health — reflect the region's rich-poor disparities. Girls born in Papua New Guinea today have a life expectancy of 57 years. On the other hand, girls born in Australia and New Zealand have life expectancies of 82 years and 80 years, respectively, according to the Population Reference Bureau. In this measure, the two countries are ahead of even some of their wealthier partners around the world.

U.S. Census 2000

June 2001:
What percent of the world's people live in urban settings? The world has experienced unprecedented urban growth in recent decades. In 1900, some 14 percent of the world were urbanites, and 12 cities had 1 million or more inhabitants. By 2000, about 47 percent of the world's population lived in urban areas (about 2.8 billion), and there were more than 400 cities with more than 1 million people, according to the Population Reference Bureau report, Human Population: Fundamentals of Growth and Change. More developed nations were about 76 percent urban, while 40 percent of residents of less developed countries lived in urban areas.

March 2001:
What percent of the U.S. population is multiracial? The 2000 Census was the first that allowed people to mark more than one race. The Census Bureau added this option because of increasing rates of interracial marriage and the growing population-especially among children and minorities-that identifies with more than one race. Of the 281.4 million people counted in the census, about 6.8 million (2.4 percent) identified with two or more races. About 4 percent of children were identified as multiracial, compared with 2 percent of adults. The most common multiracial combinations in the 2000 Census were white and American Indian and Alaska Native (1 million); white and Asian (868,000); white and black (785,000); and black and American Indian and Alaska Native (182,000). The multiracial population also included 3.2 million people-primarily Hispanic/Latino respondents-who reported "some other race" in combination with one or more other races.

March 2001:
How many "Cablinasians" are there in the United States? In 1997, after his 1997 Masters Tournament win, Tiger Woods coined the term "Cablinasian" to describe his white, black, Thai, Chinese, and American Indian background. The 2000 Census was the first that allowed people like Tiger to select multiple races, and results show that he is not alone. There were 10,672 people who reported a combination of white, black, Asian, and American Indian races. This may sound like a sizeable group, but it is only a small fraction (0.2 percent) of the total number of people who marked more than one race (6.8 million). And in the United States as a whole, only one person in every 26,370 reported this rare combination.

Youth

June 2001:
How many young people are there in the world? At the turn of this century, 1.7 billion people-more than a quarter of the world's 6 billion people-were between the ages of 10 and 24, making this group the largest ever to enter adulthood. The World's Youth 2000, a publication of the Population Reference Bureau, shows that 86 percent of 10-to-24-year-olds live in less developed countries.

June 2001:
How many children are at war? Children are on the front lines of conflicts in less developed countries. According to the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 300,000 young people under the age of 18 are soldiers. Some of these children are as young as seven or eight years old. In the last decade, an estimated two million children were killed in combat, six million were wounded, and one million orphaned. Of the 50 million people uprooted by conflict worldwide, about half are children, says UNHCR.

The international community has taken some steps to protect children from armed conflict. The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court considers it a war crime to conscript or enlist children under the age of 15 into national armed forces and to use them in hostilities. Also, in 1999, the International Labour Organization approved Convention No. 182 on the Prohibition and Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour, which includes a ban on the recruitment of children for armed conflict.

June 2001:
What are the prospects for today's young people? Overall, young people's health and educational prospects are improving, and marriage and childbearing are occurring at later, more mature stages in life, compared with previous generations, according to The World's Youth 2000, a publication of the Population Reference Bureau. Nevertheless, some concerns remain. For example:

Despite increasing attention given worldwide to education, secondary school enrollments are still low in many parts of the world, and girls' school enrollments still lag behind boys'.
Complications of pregnancy, childbirth, and unsafe abortions are the major causes of death for women ages 15 to 19.
Young people ages 15 to 24 have the highest infection rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV/AIDS.
Statistics on rape suggest that between one-third and two-thirds of rape victims worldwide are 15 years old or younger.

June 2001:
How does contraceptive use vary among regions? Contraceptive use varies substantially by region and country. Only 13 percent of married adolescents ages 15 to 19 use contraception in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 55 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 11 percent of married adolescents in Haiti use contraception, compared with 51 percent in Colombia. Turning to Asia, 7 percent use contraception in India, compared with 42 percent in Indonesia.

June 2001:
How common is adolescent childbearing? Of the 15 million young women ages 15 to 19 who give birth every year, 13 million live in less developed countries, according to The Alan Guttmacher Institute's publication, Into a New World: Young Women's Sexual and Reproductive Lives. Thirty-three percent of women in less developed countries give birth before the age of 20, ranging from a low of 8 percent in East Asia to 55 percent in West Africa. In more developed countries, about 10 percent of women give birth by age 20. However, in the United States, the level of teen childbearing is significantly higher, at 19 percent. Significant differences also exist between countries in the same region. For example, in Senegal, 43 percent of women ages 20 to 24 gave birth by age 20, compared with 70 percent in Mali.

Early pregnancy and childbearing are typically associated with less education and lower future income for young mothers.

Young people are especially vulnerable to exposure to HIV and infection because of physical, psychological, and social factors. For one thing, while youth is a time of exploring and discovering feelings and behaviors, young people often lack the social skills, services, and information necessary to avoid the risks associated with such high-risk activities as unprotected sex and illicit drug use.