NEW ZEALAND (Commonwealth Union)_According to the United Nations, the world’s population will surpass 8 billion later today. It’s a huge number, but how does New Zealand, with a population of just more than 5 million people, fit into the global picture?
The Earth’s population has increased dramatically over the last century, with the 2 billion threshold reaching right before the Great Depression in 1925. At the time, New Zealand had a population of about 1.4 million people. It took another 35 years for the global population to reach 3 billion, with each following billion-person increase taking only 10 to 15 years.
The population of Aotearoa grew as well, reaching 3 million in 1973 and 4 million 30 years later. Following a period of strong population increase fuelled by net migration beginning in 2013, New Zealand’s population surpassed 5 million in March 2020, just as the COVID-19 epidemic began to shut down the world.
It was the quickest million in the country’s history, growing in only 17 years from a population of 4 million in 2003. According to the most recent provisional figures from Stats NZ, New Zealand’s projected resident population at 30 June was 5,124,100, an increase of 0.06 percent – or 3300 individuals – over the previous quarter.
The country had slightly fewer males (2,542,800) than females (2,581,200), and the median age of females was also slightly higher, at 39.1 years, compared to 37.0 years for males. Those aged 15 to 39 made up the largest cohort, with 1,730,100 persons, followed by 1,589,500 those aged 40 to 64. There were fewer than one million individuals in each of the country’s age groups, with 964,300 under the age of 14 and 840,200 over the age of 65.
New Zealand’s population increased by 12,700 people – or 0.2 percent – in the year ended 30 June, according to demographer professor Paul Spoonley, which was lower than the OECD average of 0.6 percent. Notably, all of that growth was ascribed to natural increase (births minus deaths) – a dramatic contrast to the years 2014-2020, when net migration was a major component of New Zealand’s population growth.
“We still have more births than deaths, which keeps us in the positive territory,” Spoonley explained, “but we’re getting down there, and the most recent statistics show that we’re only growing at 0.2 percent right now, because we’re seeing that uptick in net migration loss.”
Prior to the pandemic, New Zealand had one of the fastest population growth rates of any OECD country, at 2.1 percent, Spoonley previously told RNZ. However, he claimed that development had “rapidly fallen” as border controls slowed migration.
