ABSTRACT
The world population continues to grow but the rate is declining. The population reached one billion at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 3 billion in 1960, 6 billion in 1999 and 7 billion in October 2011. The United Nations expects that the world population will reach 10 billion around the turn of the century. For centuries, the population growth rate was low, less than one tenth of a percentage per year. The situation changed in the nineteenth century (in France in the eighteenth century). The population growth rate started to increase because children were more likely to survive and women continued to have many children. The rate of growth reached a maximum of over 2 per cent in the early 1960s and has been declining since. Today it is 1.2 per cent and the United Nations expects the rate to reach 0 per cent around 2100. At that time world population growth comes to an end. 1
