A quarter billion Pakistanis: a bigger demographic dividend

The government did not make a formal announcement of this, but based on trends in our population growth, in the calendar year 2025, the population of Pakistan has very likely crossed 250 million. A quarter billion human beings are citizens of our republic. This is a milestone worth marking in its own right because scale has a logic of its own. While we are still a poor country on a per capita basis, adding more human beings has effects worth understanding in full.

Predictably, a section of the press and commentariat has viewed the population as something of a millstone, and there appears to have been some recently produced think tanks reports pointing to all the ways Pakistan’s population is a problem.

That view is mistaken, and based on a very static and backward looking examination of Pakistan’s demographic data. If one examines not just where Pakistan is, or has been, but tries to project out where the country is going, a very, very different picture emerges.

In this story, we will attempt something slightly ambitious: using differential calculus concepts to explain why Pakistan’s population is no longer a problem. We will then place Pakistan’s current position in a wider global context as one of the handful of large countries in the world – and the only large country outside sub-Saharan Africa – that is not on track to experience population collapse within this century.

This, then, has implications for the government of Pakistan’s policies on population welfare. Specifically, the government needs to stop spending money on encouraging contraception.