Peaking population

India must prepare for the social implications of declining fertility

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle is one of the leading locations for the study of population dynamics. A recent large-scale model of global population that has emerged from the institute has now been published by The Lancet journal, and it reflects a substantially altered conventional wisdom about when global population will peak and at what level. Some of the differing results of the new model come from the choice to use “completed cohort fertility at 50 years” — in other words, the mean of the number of births per female aged