The One-Minute Geographer: Populations of Latin American Nations
We’ll continue this series on Latin America with a look at the size of the population of Latin America and its component nations. There are some intriguing comparisons if we use the population of the United States as a base for comparison, and indeed, it’s helpful to look at the population of the Western Hemisphere as a whole.
We’ll start with The Western Hemisphere: North and South America. We’ll use very rough figures for population to make some of those interesting comparisons. There are about 1 billion people (1.03) on these two continents combined. Is that a lot? Yes and no. Of course, it’s a lot of people but then consider that 1 billion represents only about 1/8 of the world’s population. India and China alone each have about 1.4 billion people. North and South America combined have only about 13% of the world’s population but they make up about 30% of the world’s landmass. These figures tell us that the two continents of the Western Hemisphere are relatively underpopulated compared to the world as a whole.
As we begin our discussion of population, here’s a handy figure that is easy to remember: the population of the United States is about 333 million people. (Officially 331 million by the 2020 Census, and 335 estimated in 2023.) Adding Canada’s almost 40 million people still represents about 1/3 of the…
