Large population countries

Partly because of my recent trip(s) to China, but also as a continuation of an idea I started in describing the ocean and atmospheres, I'll take a look at national populations today. In terms of the oceans and atmospheres, I looked at what they were composed of, and found that rather few elements were sufficient to cover a large fraction of each. It's a larger group for countries, but, still, fairly few (less than 10%) of the countries are required to cover over half the population of the world. The figures here are 2005 numbers from the 2006 Information Please almanac. They'll have changed since then, of course, but more on that later.

From a world population of about 6.6 billion, countries with more than 1% of the world's population are:

1. China, 1300 million
   
2. India, 1100
   
3. USA 295
   
4. Indonesia 242
5. Brazil 186
6. Pakistan 162
7. Bangladesh 144
8. Russia 143
9. Nigeria 128
10. Japan 127
11. Mexico 106
12. Philipines 88
13. Vietnam 84
14. Germany 82
15. Egypt 77.5
16. Ethiopia 73.1
17. Turkey 69.7
18. Iran 68.0

That's it. Of 192 members of the UN (current tally on Wikipedia) , only 18 have more than 1% of the world's population. They account for a little over 2/3rds of the world's people (68%). The first 6 account for half of all the people in the world.

One thing this suggests to me is that for modern citizenship, history, geography classes, it would be a good idea to learn some specifically about these countries. If only some bare elements of things like capitals, languages, religions, a bit of history, etc. In bygone days (i.e., when I was in elementary school), we did do that sort of thing, but only for the US plus western Europe. You'll notice up there that only 1 western European country is on the list. In other words, such an education didn't do much good towards living in the world I find myself in. Actually, my school did cover most of the rest of the list but we were distinctly odd for our time and area.

The up side of learning about this set is that, while it covers a large fraction of the world's people, the list is short.

If I drew up the comparable list for, say, 1939, you'd find far more European countries present. If I did it for 1880 or so, it would be even more Europe-heavy. I'll get to those at a later date.

A different list would show up if I did it in terms of the global economy, one much heavier on Europe. But you'd see many of the same contries on that list. 4 of the G8 are already on this listing. And a somewhat different list would show up by listing countries in terms of land area. Again, though, most of the largest are already given (in rough order, the biggest are Russia -- huge, Canada, US, China, Brazil, Australia -- all very large, India, ... 5 of the 7 are already shown above).

If anyone would like to take on constructing comparable lists -- countries with 1% or more of world GDP, countries with 1% or more of world land area, countries with 1% or more of world ocean EEZ area (Indonesia moves way up!) inside their exclusive economic zones (EEZ) -- please do send it in. I'll get there one of these days, but, as my recent posting rate suggests, this can be a while.

The European Union presents some problems for such list-making. The current EU-27 represents about 500 million people, so would be number 3 on the above list (and take Germany off it), and be a 'country' larger than India in land area. On the other hand it isn't exactly a country. I just finished reading Postwar: A history of Europe from 1945 to the Present by Tony Judt. 'What is Europe' is a more interesting question than I'd thought.