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中印人口其实比联合国认为的要少

May 22, 2023 Yi Fuxian

发自威斯康星州麦迪逊——联合国在今年四月估算印度已超过中国成为世界上人口最多的国家。虽然这一发布得到了大量媒体关注，但印度2024年的人口普查可能显示出联合国的预测其实是被大大高估了。

根据印度最新的人口普查数据，该国的人口在2001年为10.3亿，2011年为12.1亿。然而联合国2022年发布的《世界人口展望》报告将这些数字分别定为10.8亿和12.6亿。此外印度全国家庭健康调查显示2017~2019年间的生育率为1.99，与《世界人口展望》2.16的估计值形成了鲜明对比。

在1974年的布加勒斯特联合国人口会议上，时任印度卫生和计划生育部长卡兰·辛格（Karan Singh）说过一句名言：“发展是最好的避孕药。”虽然人们通常认为人均收入与生育率直接相关，但生育率下降主要是由健康和教育状况的改善以及避孕药具的广泛使用所推动的。这种趋势在印度很明显：该国的生育率正随着婴儿死亡率的降低和教育水平的提高而急剧下降。

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Robert Johnston May 28, 2023

Forecasting fertility is for soothsayers, not scientists, who must base their “projections” (not “forecasts”) on painstaking gathering and analysis of all available data. This article is based on conjectures on trends in total fertility rates in India since the 2011 census and China in 2021 and substitutes conjecture for verifiable facts. No mention is made of current data on fertility in either country and its reliability, or of the other factors which importantly affect population, notably deaths (consider the still uncertain impact of Covid in these countries) and migration. The UN Population Division tries to methodically adjust for all these factors in total current population estimates, to the extent the facts allow (the last Indian population census was 2011, and apparently had a relatively wide margin of uncertainty for a census), takes considerable pains to ensure internal consistency over time, but sticks to what we know now in making its projections, with ranges of uncertainty in the low and high variants, not mentioned by Yi. To predict a total fertility rate in India of 1.2 in the near future on the basis of fertility trends in Singapore and Malaysia, as Yi does, is completely off the mark. Both are highly urbanized countries with prosperous middle classes. India is still largely rural (70 per cent), with low agricultural productivity, and with a relatively still quite small middle class. Of course we can surmise from very roughly comparable countries (Indonesia in the case of India, Korea in the case of China) that fertility rates will fall, but how quickly is a matter of conjecture and speculation in each case. Fertility rates well below replacement are a very recent demographic phenomenon and there is not much experience in their longer-term trends. Demographers learned long ago, to their chagrin, to clearly identify their projections as basic extrapolations based on available data, as subjective conjectures almost always have turned out to be wrong. Of course there is a lag in the UN Population Division identifying significant trends, whatever they may be, and incorporating them into their population models, but that is simply a matter of researching new data and verifying and comparing them with data from other sources as they become available. Robert Johnston, Senior Statistician, United Nations Statistics Divisiion (ret.).
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