I. O. ABRAMOVA Candidate of Economic Sciences Keywords: developing countries, population growth, transformation of the world economy, demographic component of economic growth, urbanization, international migration At the present stage of transformation of the world economy, the role of the demographic factor is constantly increasing. At the same time, the development of humanity will largely depend on the quantitative and qualitative population growth in developing countries. The unprecedented acceleration of population growth in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 1950s and 60s of the last century caused a shift in the global proportions of the distribution of human resources towards countries with a relatively low level of socio-economic development. The discrepancy between the demographic and economic components of world development is fraught with aggravation of a number of problems and serves as a prerequisite for the destruction of the old and the formation of a new model of world development. In 1968, the American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich first announced a "population bomb", predicting accelerated population growth in developing countries, which will lag behind the production of food and other resources necessary for human life. 1 This theory, unlike the works of Malthus*, did not derive mathematical formulas for the growth of food production and the number of inhabitants in accordance with arithmetic and geometric progressions, but gave a gloomy forecast of the onset of world hunger by the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. This forecast has not been realized, as well as due to the decline in the birth rate in developing countries. DEMOGRAPHIC EXPLOSION: ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES In the twentieth century, demographic changes affected almost all countries of the world, and their rate was much higher than in previous centuries. Significant reductions in mortality in Asian and African countries occurred partly before, but mostly ... Read more