doomed

Geographically speaking, the world is divided in two. On the one hand there are countries where more people are born than die: as a result, the population grows naturally. On the other hand, those countries where more people die than are born, which implies a population contraction and eventual disappearance… unless someone remedies it from the outside. What this map reveals Our World in data At a glance it is not something that comes overnight nor are its consequences. Behind these two colors hides the future of the economies and public systems of the different states of the planet. The map represents the natural population change during 2023, that is, the difference between how many people are born and how many die based on data from the official demographic report World Population Prospects 2024 of the UN. To prepare it, the UN used data from 1,910 censuses, birth and death records from 169 countries and 3,189 demographic surveys, so this is a fairly exhaustive compilation. Countries in blue have more births than deaths and those in orange have more deaths than births. Migration is excluded from the calculation, which allows us to see only the reproductive dynamics of each society without the corrective effect of flows of people. This reality is important because a country can appear orange on the map and still not lose inhabitants if it receives enough migrants. Note: the historical “magic” figure for a society to remain stable considering only reproduction it has been 2.1 babies per woman on average. That in a state more people die than are born on a sustained basis ago let all the alarm signals go off insofar as it causes a structural problem: the population ages, the population pyramid is inverted and there are fewer and fewer working people to finance the welfare system. Health, education and social protection systems were designed for younger and larger populations. According to the United Nationsby 2070 the number of people aged 65 or over will exceed those under 18 years of age globally. And spoiler: most states in demographic decline are world powers. And in some cases, the decline is practically irreversible. The countries that are born and the countries that die Where more people die than are born. Our World in Data A look at the countries that die returns places like Japan, China, South Korea, Russia and almost all of Eastern Europe. The most extreme case is Japan, where there are twice as many deaths as births (1.2 children per woman). South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan are between 0.7 and 0.9, well below that 2.1. China has a 1 and a particular history: the one-child policy applied between 1980 and 2015 artificially reduced entire generations. It is true that it was abandoned years ago, but the structural damage has already been done. On the old continent, Germany has had more deaths than births since the 70s and France, which was practically the only state that was saved thanks to decades of public aid for motherhood, has seen how that balance was broken. Although this map uses data from 2023, in 2025 France record more deaths than births for the first time since World War II. The block in blue includes almost all of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia. And although the map is a simplification that reduces the world in two colors, Ethiopia should be extremely blue: it has more than five times as many births as deaths. The populations of these countries have high fertility rates and a young population. Of course, this growth is not synonymous with well-being: some of these places combine high birth rates with high infant mortality, low life expectancy and precarious infrastructure to sustain this population growth. Africa is the great demographic hope in terms of growth, which is also a challenge in terms of employment, education and resources. Among the bulk of countries that are growing, there are many developing countries, but there is also the particular case of the United States: it has 20% more births than deaths. Talking about countries that are born and die sounds alarming, but let’s remember that migration is not present on this map, which means that states like Germany, Italy or Spain are not losing population in absolute terms. This means that generational replacement becomes directly dependent on migratory flows, which generates integration, coexistence and institutional challenges that cartography does not reflect. In Xataka | Europe’s brutal demographic crisis can be explained on a single map with one country as the protagonist: Nigeria In Xataka | Europe is divided in two: the devastating map of deindustrialization Cover | Our World in data