More Arabian affairs

Having noticed the arms spending of Saudi Arabia at reference 6, I now look at their vital statistics. Prompted in part by a Savoyard wine fuelled discussion in the course of an outing yet to be noticed.

At more than 2m square kilometres, Saudi Arabia is nearly ten times the size of the UK. Catches include the sand, the heat, the absence of fresh water and the absence of much land suitable for farming. But I did once hear from an engineer who had lived there, that there was plenty to interest an ornithologist.

The population looks to have grown from around 2m in 1900 (before the present country was invented), to 4m in 1950 (when proper statistics start) to maybe 35m now, of which around 10m are foreigners, including a lot of Syrians but otherwise mainly from parts further east.

The annual growth rate rose to more than 6% in the 1980’s, but has fallen back to less than 2% now.

By way of contrast, the population of the UK has near doubled from around 35m in 1900 to 65m now. The current growth rate is well under 1%.

So even leaving out the foreigners, more or less non-existent until well into the second half of the 20th century, the population of Saudi Arabia has risen a great deal faster than that of the UK. This must have resulted in social problems. Wikipedia also talks of there being a considerable excess of foreign men of working age, which must lead to more social – not to say mental health – problems. It also talks of maybe 5m illegal immigrants – and it is not clear whether these are included or additional.

Sunni Moslems are perhaps 90% of the population; Shia Muslims perhaps 5%, these last being concentrated in the east, across the water from Shiite Iran.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Saudi_Arabia.

Reference 2: http://populstat.info/Asia/saudiarc.htm. Seemingly an amateur site, the only site I found offering data from before 1950.

Reference 3: https://www.stats.gov.sa/en/node. The Saudi government site.

Reference 4: https://www.stats.gov.sa/sites/default/files/en-census31-prim-01_1.pdf. Maybe the version in Arabic is a bit more complicated.

Reference 5: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/saudi-arabia-population/. Haven’t found out who these people are or what their standing is, but it looks sophisticated.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/military-budgets.html.