Preliminary Notes
The national 1 July, mid-year population estimates (usually based on past national censuses) supplied in these tables are given in thousands.
The table columns can be sorted by clicking on their respective heading.
The retrospective figures assume the present-day names and world political division, for instance, providing data for each of the 15 republics of the former Soviet Union, as if they had already been independent by 1950, and not since the end of 1991, as they really are. An inverse criterion corresponds to Germany, forcefully divided since the end of the Second World War and eventually reunified since October 3, 1990.
Other issues concerning some countries or territories are the following ones:
- Burma is the traditional English name for (the Union of) Myanmar, as used by the United States Census Bureau.
- The Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire from 1971 to 1997, is referred to as Congo (Kinshasa) in the IDB database (to differentiate it from the Republic of the Congo whose capital is the city of Brazzaville).
- The population figures for France includes the four overseas departments of French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Réunion, but excludes Saint Barthélemy and the French part of Saint Martin, which split from Guadeloupe in 2007.
- The former British colony of Hong Kong and former Portuguese colony of Macau continue to have their own figures, even though they were returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and 1999 respectively. The Chinese government considers both present-day Special Administrative Regions (SARs) as separate entities from a statistical point of view, and their censuses are still carried out on different dates from the ones in mainland China.
- About half the population of the British Caribbean colony of Montserrat (within the Lesser Antilles) was evacuated in 1995, following a volcanic eruption that severely damaged its capital, the town of Plymouth.
- Although no figures are given for the Palestinian territories as a whole, data is supplied for both the Gaza strip and the West Bank.
- The Serbia population only refers to that of the “residual” Yugoslav republic under that name, after secession of Montenegro (Crna Gora) and, more recently, Kosovo (this latter one was recognized as an independent state by the United States government on 18 February 2008, and so the US Census Bureau reflects the resulting demographic change; nevertheless, many countries have not recognized this declaration of independence).
Finally, the Eastern and Western Europe subtotals follow the former Cold War's Iron Curtain division of Europe.
Read more about this topic: List Of Countries By Past And Future Population
Famous quotes containing the words preliminary and/or notes:
“Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life.”
—Paul Tillich (1886–1965)
“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)