Moderator : Gilles Boeuf (Collège de France)
World population projections have been carried out since 1963 by the United Nations Population Division in conjunction with national statistical services. Three variants are calculated. It will be shown that they diverge so rapidly that they provide little information on the long term. Each country's projections have varied considerably between 1963 and 2010. Take Iran and France, for example: 170 million inhabitants in Iran in 2050 in 1994, 85 million now. Similarly, 60 million for France announced in 1994, then 73 million in 2010, again for 2050.
These variations are partly due to a universalist postulate of the United Nations: in the long term, by 2100, there should no longer be any differences in fertility or mortality depending on the country, and net migration would have become zero. This unrealistic but inevitable ideological presupposition, given the United Nations' mission of peace, leads to political contortions, as illustrated by a comparison of the three current variants of China and the United States.
