Info for most countries comes from the 2022 edition of UN World Population prospects.
Countries marked with a + indicate an anomaly in the UN data that has been ignored by me.
Country #1 wasn't collecting accurate government statistics during one of the worst famines in human history, and has made efforts to scrub and deny the historical record. The numbers should be considered a very broad estimate.
If you're going to go down that road then you open a can of worms. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia seperating, South Sudan gaining independence from Sudan etc etc.
I think "genocide" might be more suitable for Cambodia than "warfare". The fighting in Cambodia killed far fewer people than were executed/starved as a result of the Khmer Rouge.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that they were recent conversions to capitalist countries. For a bunch of these, "transition to capitalism" would be a more telling cause than "demographics."
The United States also closed its borders to the socialist countries, just as the USSR closed its borders to the capitalist countries. It's a draw here.
Kinda telling that most of these countries were either under communist rule when this happened, or had recently been under communist rule. All in fact apart from Japan, Rwanda and Syria (and in Germany's case, only part of the country and over a decade earlier).
Quite true; the only countries that had no communist government in the recent past are perhaps Syria, Japan, Venezuela and Rwanda. And China isn't governed under a communist system anymore.
Not many were born in the Khmer Rouge camps though I thought. Relationships were tightly controlled along with every other minute of people's lives. Also, by 1980 many people had left Cambodia after Vietnam invaded and drove the Khmer Rouge from most areas.
Should the date for Syria not be ongoing rather than 2018? The fighting hasn't stopped, judging by the news reports, albeit ISIS have been all but wiped out territorially.
I trust the numbers. Intuition fails us in regards to demographics. For example, you might think that the population of Iraq fell during its many conflicts. But you'd be wrong. Its population has increased monotonically.
No it counts any episode of population loss within that date range. Chinese population dropped dramatically during the "Great Leap Forward"- following the adoption of Communist principles when the country was led by dangerously deluded people who put ideology before facts, local leaders were afraid to report that the forced land/labor redistributions that their socialist leaders commanded had not resulted in huge boosts to productivity. In fact the agricultural yields were much lower, but, afraid to report the truth, local bureaucrats reported that they were higher. A percentage of the yields had to be sent to Beijing, so this resulted in many provinces sending basically all of their food to the capital leaving nothing for themselves to eat. Some estimates of the death toll exceed 20 million people, but it's hard to say for sure. After the country recovered from the famine and economic recession that followed, there was a baby boom and the population began to rapidly recover.
This is a really good visualization of the impacts of the Great Leap Forward. You can very clearly see an enormous dip in China's life expectancy in the late 50s and early 60s, followed by a recovery to normal levels in the late 60s. (I recommend watching the rest of the video too, it's really interesting and a great showcase of human development in the past 2 centuries!)
Not sure whether this was a major factor but after a period of mass immigration, (West) Germany imposed a recruitment ban in 1973. Almost all of the refugees from the East went to West Germany so that doesn't explain it.
How many of the episodes labeled "Demographics" could be more specifically categorized as "Migration" (lots of the former SSRs), and how many as "Fertility" (Japan)?
In most of Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Balkans, Baltics) its both
Hungary and Russia are losing population exclusively through low birth rates as they've both have positive net migration since the 90s. Germany also has bad birth rates and a natural decline but this has been significantly offset by migration now
Kazakhstan has crazy high birth rates, the decline was due to Russians mass migrating to Russia after the fall of the USSR
In Georgia its almost exclusively migration, they lost very few people due to negative natural increase but are entering negative natural increase again
Latvia is officially the hardest hit, they lost almost a third of their population since 1991 and its still going, but Bosnia is probably doing even worse since they very likely dipped under 3M already. Ukraine is catching up fast
Interesting -- thought Georgia would be too small. Shouldn't it be war and demographics? South Ossetia and Abkhazia conflicts must have contributed somewhat to the decline.
That's the question I was going to ask. The caveat includes "Only one episode per country". So it may be that the two conflicts together reduced the population less than the overall demographic decline. And the date starts in 1989, before both conflicts and closer to the collapse of the USSR.
Cambodia is... interesting. Most of the people who were killed were not targeted for their nationality, ethnicity, race, nor religion, but "genocide" certainly gets the scale of the crimes and policies employed by the Khmer Rouge against their own people across in a way that I'm not sure another English word could. And as Quizmaster linked, it's commonly referred to as a genocide.
I personally don't know if I'd call it a genocide, but it's not necessarily wrong. Genocide was certainly a part of it (while not the main focus of their violence, the Khmer Rouge *did* intentionally target ethnic minorities.)
The UN source data that's used in the quiz show a very obvious dip to about 1.5 million around 1990 because of the Iraqi invasion and ensuing Gulf War. The data you found on Wikipedia looks like it's just for births and deaths and so doesn't account for population changes due to other causes. So no, you didn't read it incorrectly, it's just not the right data for the quiz.
Perhaps Kuwait is counting citizens, and the UN is counting residents.
I think the UN is more likely correct here.
Side note: The quality of Wikipedia's data is getting worse and worse lately. I hope they get some competition. Their budget gets bigger and bigger while the core product gets worse.
Lebanon's been having a war since 2015? Or is it talking about their involvement (especially Hezbollah) in the Syrian Civil War? Either way, I'm surprised that they've lost population--I thought the Syrian refugee crisis would have made their population swell.
The data show a big population spike of about 1.5 million around 2010 that I'm guessing represents waves of refugees from the Syrian Civil War. It's hard to tell what the decline since then is from, but looks like it's mostly because of emigration.
Countries marked with a + indicate an anomaly in the UN data that has been ignored by me.
Country #1 wasn't collecting accurate government statistics during one of the worst famines in human history, and has made efforts to scrub and deny the historical record. The numbers should be considered a very broad estimate.
Hungary and Russia are losing population exclusively through low birth rates as they've both have positive net migration since the 90s. Germany also has bad birth rates and a natural decline but this has been significantly offset by migration now
Kazakhstan has crazy high birth rates, the decline was due to Russians mass migrating to Russia after the fall of the USSR
In Georgia its almost exclusively migration, they lost very few people due to negative natural increase but are entering negative natural increase again
Latvia is officially the hardest hit, they lost almost a third of their population since 1991 and its still going, but Bosnia is probably doing even worse since they very likely dipped under 3M already. Ukraine is catching up fast
I personally don't know if I'd call it a genocide, but it's not necessarily wrong. Genocide was certainly a part of it (while not the main focus of their violence, the Khmer Rouge *did* intentionally target ethnic minorities.)
1989: 2,084,000
1990: 2,088,000
1991: 2,031,000
1992: 1,924,000
Am I reading that wrong? I don't see a 1,150,000 decrease during 1990-1991.
I think the UN is more likely correct here.
Side note: The quality of Wikipedia's data is getting worse and worse lately. I hope they get some competition. Their budget gets bigger and bigger while the core product gets worse.