Perspectives: Land Inequality

The global population is estimated to be over 8 billion (and perhaps even as high as 10 billion). Regardless, there's a lot of people in the world and it already feels very, very crowded. Just look at Tokyo, Jakarta, Delhi, Shanghai, etc. Imagine how it'll be in 2050 when the global population is anticipated to be 25% higher! Where will people live? Will we run out of space?

The below chart puts some of our demographic challenges into perspective. Excluding Antartica, the sum of the land area across the U.N.'s 193 or so countries is 57.5 million square miles. Roughly half of the world's population live in 20 Asian countries with a combined land area of only 7 million square miles (highlighted in yellow). So, 50% of humanity lives across just 12% of the world's land.  

But that's not all. There is also significant land inequality within nations. Consider China and India, two of the world's most populous countries. About 94% of China's 1.4 billion people live inside 50% of the country's land area. In India, 50% of its 1.4 billion people live on 27% of the country's land in the north. Add in Bangladesh and its 175 million people sitting next to India and below China and you have about a fifth of humanity living across less than 4% of the planet's land--roughly 730 people /square mile! 

Of course, we are not suggesting (by extrapolation) that earth can support 40 billion people! The question of how many people our planet can permanently support is a complex one and hotly debated. Various studies on the subject, based on the idea of "carrying capacity," have produced enormous ranges from 2 billion (were way past that!) to one trillion! Though the majority of studies put the earth's carrying capacity at around 8 billion. But maybe if we could just move people around a little better (immigration!), we might safely be able to support a few billion more! Consider Australia and Canada, they occupy 11% of the world's land area but have just 0.8% of its population!  

Land, labor, and capital...inequality exists across each of these key economic inputs.