Demographic transition in Bangladesh: What happened in the twentieth century and what will happen next?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the total population of Bangladesh was less than 30 million. The annual growth rate of the population was less than 1 per cent until 1951, when the population reached about 44 million (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, 1998). From the early 1950s, mortality started to decline while fertility remained high until the 1970s. Owing to the changes in fertility and mortality rates, from the 1950s the population started to grow at an unprecedented rate, reaching an all-time high (about 2.5 per cent per year) in the 1960s and 1970s. The growth rate then started to decline in the 1980s and is currently about 1.5 per cent per year (figure 1). At the close of the twentieth century, the population of Bangladesh stood at about 130 million.