Developed & Maintained by Lloyd C. Russow
Philadelphia University
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If The World Were A Village of 1,000 in 2000
- AN UPDATE -

Furthermore, in the year 2000:
North America would have 52 people. The population in the five largest countries would be: 208 in China, 168 in India, 47 in the United States, 35 in Indonesia and 28 in Brazil. Seventy-five percent of the population would live in 25 countries, at least 47 of today’s nations would not be inhabited at all.

There are 97 pre-school children, 286 between the ages of 5 and 19, and 42 people are over 70 (and of those, 4 men and 5 women are over 80).

There would only be 15 religions in the world (secular/nonreligious is not included as one of these), four of which would have only one follower: Baha'I, Jainism, Shinto, and Cao Dai.

Half the population of the villagers speak one of 20 languages (as opposed to the 6,000+ in the world today). The Urban population is 470, the rural is 530, and 50 people are involved in agriculture.

Of the 145 people who are illiterate, 143 live in Developing nations and 106 live in Asia (36 men and 70 women). There are 238 men and 60 women who smoke. One new case of tuberculosis diagnosed every year.

This is copyrighted material, portions of which will appear in International Marketing by Vern Terpstra, Ravi Sarathy and Lloyd Russow, 9th edition. When using data from here, kindly cite it:

Lloyd Russow, Village of 1,000 in 2000, http://faculty.philau.edu/russowl/villageof1000.html. Thank you.

This is an updated and adapted version of Dr. Donella Meadows' 1990 State of the Village Report.
If you would like additional statistics , you may download a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel format (be sure to look at the charts and additional data on the other worksheets in the file) <click here>, or in an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file <click here>. A PDF file of population charts is also available <click here>, as is a file of the religion and language charts <click here>. These files will be updated regularly to include new criteria. The newest files are dated January 9, 2003. The Excel spreadsheet includes special notes of explanation about some of the data such as what constitutes "other" under land, and citations for specific tables from which the data was obtained.

History of "Village of 1,000":
“If the world were a village of 100 people there would be 61 Asians, 12 Africans, 29 Christians, only one would have a college education, 50 would be malnourished, …” is a list that has been circulated via the Internet, on web postings and received as e-mail by millions around the world over the past 10 years. There are all sorts of rumors and nearly cult-like explanations about the origins of the Global Village of 1000 (not 100, as so often mentioned in e-mail) which is the reported source of the list. It’s difficult to state unequivocally who the original author was since this has developed into something like the old game 'telephone,' where one person whispers a secret to another, who relays it to another, and another, until the result is revealed some 20 people later – the final statement is very often quite different than that which was originally uttered. David Taub, an enterprising individual provides details for the most likely author – Dr. Donella Meadows, a distinguished professor at Dartmouth (with the Environmental Studies Program), author and highly respected economist for the Sustainability Institute (she died at the age of 59 in 2001). The Village of 1,000 was included in her "State of the Village Report" as part of her weekly column, the Global Citizen on May 31, 1990.

Sources of Data:

Additional Readings:

Statistical Notes:
The statistics on land where calculated to allow comparison with the figures reported in the 1990 version. According to the World Bank (Table 1.1, pages 18-21, 2002 World Development Indicators), there are 133,805,800 square kilometers of surface area in the world. Surface area being total area within national boundaries, including land under inland bodies of water and some coastal waterways. Land mass under oceans is not included. There are approximately 247.104 acres per square kilometer, so the total number of acres is calculated as 33.06 billion acres. Divide this by a total population of 6.06 billion and the result is 5.46 acres per person. Since there are only 1,000 persons in the world, there is only 5,459 acres of land in this Village of 1,000. You can obtain surface area and population statistics from the World Bank online - Data Query. Note that resources do not always agree. According to the CIA World Factbook, 2002, total surface area in the world is 148.94 million square kilometers – a difference of 15 million kilometers!

Reportedly, there were 6 acres per person in 1990. Why the decline to 5.45 acres in only 10 years? One reason is the increase in population. In 1990, the world population was approximately 5.275 billion according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Assuming the surface area has remained unchanged, the number of acres per person in 1990 would have been 6.23 (33.06 billion acres divided by 5.275 billion people). The remaining difference is likely due to different measurement techniques or different sources were used (as shown, the CIA and World Bank differ in surface area estimates by 15 million square kilometers).

The total number of acres in the village was also reduced in the past ten years, from 6,000 to 5,459 acres. How, or why? In the real world, the land surface might change because of global warming and subsequent increase in ocean size, which is not included in the World Bank as surface area. In the real world then, barring catastrophic changes, land does not decrease. But, in the real world, population increases. In our village population does not increase and since the number of people is held constant, other measurements must change, including the immutable surface area or land mass.
 

I will update the downloadable files by adding new criteria (crime statistics, for example) as time allows. If you would like to suggest criteria to add, please send me a note, including the type of criteria or measure you would like to include, and if possible a resource. Data will be added using credible resources only which will be cited as fully as possible so you may assess the resource yourself, update the data of interest and add what you like.

This site was developed as is maintained by
Dr. Lloyd C. Russow, Ph.D.
Associate Dean, School of Business Administration
Professor of International Business & Marketing
Philadelphia University
School of Business Administration
Philadelphia, PA  19144-5497
Ph: 215-951-2819
Fx: 215.951.2652
E-mail: RussowL@PhilaU.edu

Date of Ev-In site creation: September 15, 1996.
Date of last update of Ev-In web pages: July1, 2003.
Date of last hyperlink check of Ev-In web pages: July 11, 2003.
Copyright © 2003.