Countries by Children Population

The young and the old

Demography is destiny, or so the saying goes, and few maps illustrate the point as starkly as one showing the share of children in each country's population. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, more than half the population is under 18. In Japan, South Korea and Italy, that figure dips below 15%. These are not small differences. They are two entirely different futures.

The pattern is not subtle. Nearly every country with an exceptionally young population sits in sub-Saharan Africa: Niger, Chad, Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic. In each, well over half the citizens have not yet reached adulthood. Meanwhile the rich world, from Germany to Japan, is ageing fast, with children making up a fifth of the population or less.

This divergence carries real consequences. Countries with a youthful population face pressure to build schools, create jobs and expand health care for a generation that has not yet entered the workforce, a challenge and, potentially, an opportunity, if that youth bulge is put to productive use. Ageing societies face the opposite problem: shrinking workforces, rising pension bills and the slow arithmetic of fewer workers supporting more retirees.

Neither extreme is inherently good or bad. A young population can become a demographic dividend, as it did in East Asia in the late 20th century, or a source of instability, if governments fail to provide opportunity fast enough. What the map makes clear is that these are not abstract statistics. They are a preview of the pressures each government will face in the coming decades, written plainly across the globe in shades of pink and blue.