ABSTRACT
People worry about population for all sorts of reasons and at different scales. The chapter discusses regional and national issues: all those economic migrants and refugees heading their way wanting their jobs; migrants with the wrong sort of ethnicity, culture or religion not fitting in; and ageing populations with too few young people to replace them. It is about the nature of the global human population, which has seen huge increases over the last few hundred years. The world's population is not evenly distributed, with India and China having the largest national numbers. Population growth rates vary widely as well. Among the larger countries, these range from the negative: -0.44% (Ukraine) and -0.2% (Japan) to the positive: +3.23% (the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and +3.155 (Tanzania). Smaller countries show a similar range. The fertility rate needed to maintain a steady population is 2.1 children per woman.
