Demographics

Eight series on population and households, covering world population, birth rate, total fertility rate, life expectancy, the share of population aged 65 and over, and under-five mortality.

Reading across them, one pattern recurs: indicators that everyone moves in the same direction reshuffle their rankings in a counter-intuitive way. Where every country's fertility is falling, the country that fell least rises to the top — the Central African Republic leads the birth-rate table in 2024 not by rising but by holding its level while everything around it dropped. Rank changes here often say more about relative speed than about direction.