Population & Demographics
Population
Population is the total number of people residing in a country, the denominator behind every per-capita economic figure — GDP per capita, debt per capita, and more. India and China each exceed 1.4 billion, together accounting for roughly a third of the world's population, which is why per-capita comparisons matter more than raw totals when ranking economies.
Why it matters
It's the shared denominator that turns absolute figures like GDP into comparable per-person measures across every country page.
Also known as: total population, headcount