

Life expectancy, which measures the age of death, has doubled in every region in the world as we show here.Ĭhild & infant mortality – Mortality at a young age has a particularly big impact on demographic change.įertility rates – Rapid population growth has been a temporary phenomenon in many countries. Life expectancy – Improving health leads to falling mortality and is therefore the factor that increases the size of the population. We show how the world population grew over the last several thousand years and we explain what has been driving this change.

World population growth – This article is focusing on the history of population growth up to the present.

The world population growth rate declined from 2.2% per year 50 years ago to 1.05% per year. The world population increased from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.7 billion today. When and why did the world population grow? And how does rapid population growth come to an end? These are the big questions that are central to this research article.
