Demographic trends have never been evenly distributed around the world. As a mater of fact, traditional societies tended to reproduce the same quantity of people throughout the centuries. For generations the population in Europe, China and India remained stagnant, as far as the main source of wealth, the earth, remained the same as number of cultivated acreages. It was the Malthus theory of natural selection formulated some 200 years ago that shaped the intellectual mainstream in Europe and around the world. According to this theory, cultivated land can's meet the growing population. Therefore the author suggested the need of wars, diseases of any kind and above all starvation that would reestablish the natural equilibrium between the population and its main source of existence.

Every time we hear someone talking about "overcrowding", the need of "life space", and the lack of land for feeding the population, in fact we hear the remote students of Malthus. It was an absolutely Malthusean approach that made the United States to put a brake on the mass European immigration after the WWI because of "shortage of land". It's not surprising that even today the growing population is perceived mainly as a threat, not as an economic opportunity. It seems not politically correct to acknowledge that even with human population of more than 6 billion there is less starvation on global scale in absolute and relative terms.

With population ageing in many developed countries there are new dangers, or at least new phenomena perceived as threats by both economists and urban planners. What will happen if within 1-2 generations the population drops by 20% or more? Will this mean collapse of the social protection system? How this will affect the real estate markets? How the construction activity in long run will be affected in countries such as Russia, Japan or Germany? Depopulation of Siberia and Russians fleeing westward so far doesn't concern many outside those affected. 20 years from now it may lead to another process of territorial repartition, accompanied or not by military confrontation between Moscow and Beijing.

No less intriguing is the fate of some countries in Western Europe like Germany, expecting gradual depopulation in the following decades. Will this be followed by real estate depression, with no more demand to meet the supply side? Such conclusions would be although premature. As the population growth doesn't automatically create starvation, the shortage of people won't automatically mean economic depression. People today, especially in the most developed countries tend to live in much larger living spaces than 1-2 generations ago. Living alone or in couple in a detached house of 1,000 sq.feet is considered to be a norm as was a norm in the same countries to have large families of 10 occupying the same living space some 50-60 years ago. So it won't be surprising by 2050 to find people looking for even larger spaces to satisfy their living aspirations. It isn't the number of buyers that will count, but their pockets and the future life standards we still know nothing about.

Demographic trends 2000-2050:

• World +50%
• Developed world +4%
• Developing world +55%
• United States +43%
• Japan -20%
• Russia -17%
• Germany -9%
• China +10%
• India +49%
• Nigeria +200%
• Bangladesh +100%

(Source: Population Reference Bureau)