Eleven indicators across 182 countries, from 1960 to 2025. Switch between metrics and years; hovering any country shows its full demographic profile regardless of which metric is selected.
Source: UN World Population Prospects and World Bank, via Our World in Data. Values shown at five-year intervals from 1960, with annual data for 2020 onward, ending in 2023 where the underlying series currently stops. Sex ratio at birth is biologically about 105 males per 100 females; values meaningfully above that indicate sex-selective practices.
Total population makes a poor map. China and India dominate it, and everything else compresses into indistinguishability.
Median age is more informative because it encodes several things at once: past fertility, life expectancy, and migration history. A country with a median age of 15 and one with a median age of 49 face almost entirely different policy problems — one is building schools, the other is funding pensions.
The extremes on this map are stark. Niger’s median age is 15.3; Japan’s is 49.0. No other single number separates two countries’ near-term futures so completely.
Fertility below 2.1 means eventual decline. That figure is roughly replacement level. A large share of the world is now below it, including much of East Asia, Europe and increasingly Latin America. Population may still grow for decades afterwards through demographic momentum, but the direction is set.
Growth rate and fertility can diverge. A country with low fertility can still grow through migration or because a large cohort is still of childbearing age. Compare the two maps for the same year.
The old-age dependency ratio is the fiscal measure. It counts people over 65 per hundred of working age, and it is what pension and healthcare systems actually respond to.
Sex ratio at birth should sit near 1.05. That is the biological norm. Values meaningfully above it indicate sex-selective practices. The map makes the outliers visible immediately.
Urbanisation reorders resource questions. Read alongside the water stress map: urban concentration changes both where water is needed and how efficiently it is delivered.
Demography sits underneath most of the other datasets on this site. Population growth is a multiplier on every per-capita figure, and age structure determines consumption patterns.
My own work on the population-energy-emissions relationship:
Data from UN World Population Prospects and the World Bank, via Our World in Data.