How population became Pakistan’s superpower

And why the West is closing its doors—and what that means for our future.

Ghansham Das, a Mirpurkhas-based TikToker surrounded by kids from his village. I interviewed him in 2022, after Pakistan’s devastating superfloods.

For many Pakistanis, hope is elusive in 2025.

If you live in the country, between political repression, inflation, and Modi warmongering, silver linings are hard to see. If you live outside, the guilt of being a tiny part of a genocidal system that is bombing and now starving 2 million Gazans, is paralyzing.

And if you live in between, wanting to escape, you probably still haven’t recovered from the fact that 4 years ago the U.S. dollar was Rs 150 and now we feel lucky it has come down from Rs 300 to Rs 280.

That’s if you’re educated and privileged enough for legal immigration to seem like a possibility. For the hundreds of Pakistanis who drown at sea or die trekking to Europe through human traffickers each year, it clearly wasn’t.

With all that in mind, it's hard to imagine that in two decades, hope and possibility will be bursting at the seams in Pakistan.

But that’s exactly what is predicted in PwC’s landmark “World in 2050” report. Pakistan is projected to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world over the next 25 years.

Pakistan could leapfrog eight places in global economic rankings—surpassing Italy and Canada in purchasing power terms, moving from 24th to 16th largest economy.

Let that sink in. A country the world often dismisses as hopeless, is projected to outperform several of the world’s largest advanced economies.

And the big reason is our young population.

In 2050, there will be 309 million Pakistanis, most of them young and working in a world leap-frogged by AI. Pakistanis are often scolded about our population growth by Western experts, but the truth is our busy baby-making is what makes our future competitive and hopeful.

The future belongs to the young

Today it may seem like geriatric politicians and short-sighted energy companies and war-mongering capitalists dictate the future, but when you take the long view, different projections emerge.

I think a lot about the future. That’s obvious for folks who follow me on Instagram where I launched an account in 2020 called 2030 Mama, because that’s the year my daughter will turn 18. I’m parenting for her today, but also for her tomorrow, keeping in mind the legacy of our ancestors.

I started thinking about 2050, when I was straight out of college. My first job was at a think tank in DC in 2004, where I was working on a project called the 7 Revolutions. In it, we presented 7 future predictions of the world’s biggest challenges and opportunities to leading CEOs and politicians around the world. Sometimes the sessions were top secret. I started as an intern and was in charge of backend work and never made it to the meetings at the Pentagon, Coca Cola, or Booz Allen, but did go to the softer presentations at universities.

I’m not going to be sharing data from there, but from a credible report built by the consulting firm PwC in 2017. It's based on rigorous modelling, the data from the last 8 years tracks, and also because the report has become the backbone of how a lot of powerful companies and countries plan their power games and takeovers.

Looking ahead, we think we will see emerging economies come to dominate the 21st century. By 2050 we project China will be the largest economy in the world by a significant margin, while India could have edged past the US into second place and Indonesia have risen to fourth place. The EU27’s share of global GDP (Gross Domestic Product, a measure of a country's total economic output) could have fallen to below 10%. We also think the world economy will more than double in size between now and 2050, far outstripping population growth.

Here’s what we can say now: the future belongs to countries that dominate two things–AI and young populations.

That’s why the three tiny devils Saudi, UAE, and Qatar recently bent their billions, even trillions, backwards for Trump and his promise of AI chips. These tiny countries are going to run out of petrol soon and without large populations, they know they can’t sustain globally competitive economies without AI. (An aside, of the three,_, Saudi Arabia has a slight edge here, their population is expected to grow from 33 million now to 47 million in 2050 and they could stay ahead with AI.)

By contrast, countries like Nigeria, Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Pakistan are on the rise, powered by their young population. Nigeria is projected to jump from the 22nd largest economy to 14th, Vietnam from 32nd to 20th, Bangladesh from 31st to 23rd and Pakistan from 24th to 16th. All of the top 15 fastest-growing large economies through 2050 are not in the “West”—nine of them are in Asia.

This table is not wishful thinking. It’s the result of something called economic convergence theory: lower-income countries can grow faster than rich ones because they have more room to catch up, especially when paired with capital investment and technology transfer. I’ll be sharing some geeky economics terms here, but I’ll explain them along the way.

America’s response: Fortress AI

The rise of Asia is one reason the United States is pulling up its drawbridge.

It is no coincidence that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that the Trump administration will “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.”

Since the start of the year, over 4700 international students —mostly grad students from China and India, but also from 40 other countries—have had their F-1 student visas terminated. Many were pursuing PhDs and master’s degrees in artificial intelligence. A court ruling briefly paused the campaign in April, but now it’s back with renewed force.

According to Open Doors, which tracks foreign student data, one in two of the more than 1.1 million international students in U.S. colleges today are from either China or India. Last year, international students contributed $44 billion to the U.S. economy, so this is one expensive attack by the Trump administration.

The timing is not accidental. China and India are projected to overtake the U.S. as leading global economies by 2050. When GDP is measured at market exchange rates (MERs), the shift in global economic power appears less dramatic, since price levels tend to be lower in emerging economies. Still, China is expected to surpass the U.S. as the largest economy before 2030, with India in third place by 2050—signaling a significant power shift toward Asia, regardless of the metric used.

This protectionist shift in the U.S. is guided by a blueprint: the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which the Trump administration is already working to implement. The plan envisions a fear-driven, isolationist world order—one that deliberately restricts access to AI and STEM fields for Chinese and Indian students.

Two-thirds of U.S. graduate students in artificial intelligence-related programs are foreign-born, mostly in China and India. Cutting them off is not just xenophobic—it’s strategic. The U.S. isn’t just tightening its borders; it’s trying to decapitate the global AI talent pipeline.

Many Asian students depend on post-graduation pathways like Optional Practical Training (OPT) and H-1B visas to stay and work in the U.S. Project 2025 calls for sweeping restrictions to these programs. But it goes further. It proposes a hostile environment for international students through a mix of visa revocations, heightened surveillance, political targeting, institutional pressure, and severe economic consequences.

In short, the U.S. isn’t just trying to dominate AI. It’s trying to ensure its competitors never get a fair shot.

Where GDP growth comes from

Coming back to the PwC report, it focuses “on the fundamental drivers of growth: demographics and productivity, which in turn is driven by technological progress and diffused through international trade and investment.”

These are the very forces that saw America progress through the 19th and early 20th centuries to become the largest economy in the world despite civil war, many conflicts with foreign powers, three presidential assassinations, and numerous economic and financial crises. These forces also helped global economic growth bounce back from two world wars and a Great Depression to eventually reach record levels of growth in the post-war decades.

Long-term projections that look beyond short-term economic and political cycles, help reveal bigger stories.

And I’m going to be sharing bits of Pakistan’s big story here.

The World in 2050

By 2050, the global economic landscape will look dramatically different. Emerging economies such as Mexico and Indonesia are projected to surpass the UK and France in size (measured in Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP). Pakistan and Egypt could overtake Italy and Canada.

PPP is a method of comparing economies by evaluating the price of a standard basket of goods across countries, offering a clearer picture of the real purchasing power of each nation's currency.

Some of the biggest projected movers over the next 25 years include Nigeria, Vietnam, and Pakistan.

But there is an important caveat: while these emerging economies benefit from rapid population growth, their long-term success depends on their ability to generate enough jobs for their expanding youth populations. Without this, their growth trajectories could stall—or worse, spark political instability. These projections, then, represent potential, not certainty.

The top 15 fastest-growing large economies between now and 2050 are all from the developing world. In contrast, advanced economies are expected to slide down the global rankings. Germany and France could fall to 9th and 11th place, respectively. Japan, once the world's second-largest economy, is likely to drop to 8th. Italy is projected to fall the furthest among G7 countries—from 12th to 21st—due to its ageing population and sluggish productivity growth.

A key driver of growth in emerging markets will be the expansion of their working-age populations, which boosts both labor supply and domestic demand. In countries like Nigeria, Pakistan, and India, the working-age population is expected to grow faster than the total population.

Meanwhile, in many developed economies—Japan, Italy, and Germany, among others—populations are projected to shrink by 2050. This decline will be driven largely by a contraction in the working-age demographic. Across G7 nations, the working-age population is expected to fall at an average annual rate of -0.3% until 2050.

By contrast, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh could average annual GDP growth of around 5% from 2025 to 2050. This growth will be fueled not just by demographic momentum but also by increases in productivity, capital investment, and technological advancement—reflected in strong real GDP per capita gains.

However, to translate this demographic advantage into real economic dividends, emerging economies like Pakistan must pursue deep structural reforms: strengthening institutions, improving economic stability, and most importantly, investing in mass education.

From PwC:

The so-called “demographic dividend”—economic growth arising from a young labor force—is only realized when enough productive employment opportunities exist. Countries like Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, the Philippines, and to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia, face a critical challenge: ensuring that private sector growth keeps pace with labor force expansion. If not, a large cohort of unemployed or underemployed youth—especially young men—can become a source of social and political unrest, as seen in parts of the Middle East and North Africa in recent years.

Population dynamics will be a central driver of economic transformation over the next 25 years, but inclusive growth, productive employment, and strategic reform will determine whether this potential is fully realized—or messy.

The “GDP” paradox and moving to a wellbeing economy

That said, I majored in Political Science and Economics in college 20 years ago, and I’ve worked as a journalist across the “developing” poor world and the “developed” affluent world, and always view “GDP” progress with a bucket, not a pinch of salt.

Our quality of life or happiness is not determined by our country’s wealth. It's determined by how fairly and equally that wealth and access to opportunity is distributed and how we treat our fellow citizens. And science backs me up.

That’s why, even though India made surreal gains in its economy, in the 2025 World Happiness Report it ranks 9 points lower than Pakistan in the happiness index.

While India’s is exponentially adding billionaires to the world, and reaching the level of Japan’s $4 trillion economy, according to the World Inequality Report 2022, the top 1% of India’s population holds more than 40% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% own just 3%.

Also more data to back me up from the Happiness report. According to it, the opposite of happiness is despair, and they track that morbidly by death by suicide or substance abuse – which they call ‘deaths of despair’. Deaths of this kind are falling in the majority of countries, though not in the United States, the biggest economy in the world.

While the report does look at GDP per capita, it also looks at other softer metrics such as:

• Life evaluation (3-year average)

• Inequality

• Social support

• Healthy life expectancy

• Freedom

• Generosity

• Perceptions of corruption

• Positive emotions

• Negative emotions

• Donations

• Volunteering

• Helping a stranger

The annual report is published by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and an Editorial Board.

There is a new crop of economists who want to start looking at economic progress beyond GDP, from the lens of well-being, health and happiness of people and the planet.

A Wellbeing Economy is an economy designed to serve people and the planet, not the other way around. In a Wellbeing Economy, the rules, norms and incentives are set up to deliver quality of life and flourishing for all people, in harmony with our environment, by default. In a Wellbeing Economy, our definition of societal success shifts beyond GDP growth to delivering shared wellbeing. This involves a fundamental systems change. A good economy is when the rules and incentives are designed to ensure everyone has enough to live in comfort, safety, and happiness. When people feel secure in their basic comforts and can use their creative energies to support the flourishing of all life on this planet.

Economists at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance tested this by removing the top 1% from their economic projections, comparing income growth France and the US. This allowed them to look at income growth for the 99% – which provided a better picture of economic performance for everyday people. The result according to them?

Income growth was faster for the majority of French than it was for the majority of Americans. Incomes grew by nearly 26% in France compared with 18% in the US over the 30-year period. This was the *opposite* of the result from the analysis that included the 1% of highest earners, which suggests that the majority of the US’s much-touted economic benefits have been flowing to the very rich.

This points to something that’s deeply felt by many US citizens, as they struggle to make ends meet while investors (and the media) cheer an economic “rebound.” The problem with topline measures like GDP growth is they don’t capture the lived experiences of everyday people, nor do they factor in wellbeing measures like health and happiness. That’s why European countries like Iceland, Finland and Wales, are starting to use wellbeing-oriented metrics to inform economic policy decisions.

According to the World Happiness Report, Finland is the happiest country in the world.

The road ahead: will Pakistan catch its moment?

That’s the crossroads we’re at. Pakistan’s population curve is steep. The opportunity is enormous. We are doing pretty well in many indicators of happiness and wellbeing such as social support, generosity, donating, volunteering or helping a stranger, but Pakistan will have to invest in education, tech, and good governance to keep progress equal.

Especially in regards to resource capture by the military or elite of the country.

Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh are already posting average growth rates around 5% a year. If Pakistan invests in education, tech, and good governance, it can join them. In fact, the PwC report identifies Pakistan—along with Nigeria, Egypt, and the Philippines—as having exceptionally high growth potential if institutions can unlock it.

A group of mothers and farmers in their adult literacy class in Matairi, Sindh. I interviewed them in 2023 for BBC radio’s the Climate Question.

Already, the signs are there: in TikTok content empires and gig workers; in AI startups; in remittance economies; in girls coding from their apartments. These are the seeds of our 2050.

But Pakistan’s path to prosperity is far from guaranteed.

Two uniquely destabilizing forces loom over its future: climate change and Hindutva hostility. Pakistan is already one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world—facing deadly floods, water scarcity, and rising temperatures that threaten agriculture, infrastructure, and human survival. At the same time, growing militarization over provincial resources, and political brinkmanship from India—especially under Modi’s leadership—threatening Pakistan’s water access, casts a long shadow.

While countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh can hyper-focus on growth, Pakistan must walk a tightrope—balancing climate resilience with fair distribution of resources and opportunity, with India’s war posturing.

As it is Pakistan has yet to recover from the $30 billion in losses from the superfloods of 2022.

Without bold investment in climate adaptation, and without the military swapping its corrosive political engineering with addressing the real rights and resource concerns in Balochistan, KP, and Gilgit Baltistan, the demographic promise we hold could easily unravel.

Never forget that while Pakistani human traffickers are mostly Punjabi, the ones who drown at sea are mostly from Balochistan and Pakistan’s north.

This moment—painful, politically repressive, and paralyzing—is not our whole story.

There’s a bigger one unfolding. And I’m hoping for the best. Are you?

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Thank you so much for reading and/or listening. Please🤍 this post or drop a comment below if it resonated with you or made you pause and think differently. I’d be so grateful.