18 Figure 7 lists the top 20 economies in terms of future, growth-driven construction needs. In per capita terms, the list includes fast-growing economies in Asia (China, Viet Nam and India), Eastern Europe (Poland, Romania and Hungary) and Latin America (Panama and the Dominican Republic). Focusing on total volume, China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Viet Nam dominate the list. LICs are missing from the list because they were not as of 2019 forecasted to grow fast in terms of per capita GDP, or at least not fast enough to allow enough of these nations to pass the cut-off at which volumes per capita increase with incomes.

Developing Asia accounts for 77% of future global construction needs vs. 8% for Africa and 5% for Latin America. China alone might need to build 100 billion m<sup>3</sup> (3% of its current stock). Given their high income growth _and_ population growth, India and Indonesia might need to increase their current stock by 8% (77 billion m<sup>3</sup> ) and 6% (15 billion m<sup>3</sup> ), respectively. In both countries, the effects of fast income growth and fast population growth compound each other. Other large economies with significant future needs are Bangladesh (14% of its current stock), the Philippines (10%), Egypt (5%), Viet Nam (5%), and Pakistan (4%). In contrast, the U.S. might need to increase its stock by 1% only. However, that is high in absolute terms (14 billion m<sup>3</sup> in the U.S. vs. 15 billion m<sup>3</sup> in Indonesia), since the U.S. has a large building stock to start with.

Noticeably, the rankings are barely affected if we only consider the effects of income growth (not shown). That is because income growth is what is driving future construction in that exercise. Indeed, countries with the highest population growth rates today are low-income countries characterized by sluggish income growth rates. In addition, given the non-linearities seen in Figure 4, economic growth may not increase per capita volumes for LICs and LMICs.

Lastly, meeting the predicted needs would increase global carbon emissions by _∼_ 8%.

**4.3.2. Forecast until 2050** We obtain each country’s predicted population in 2050 (United Nations, 2019) and predict total construction needs by 2050. Not knowing future incomes, we cannot forecast construction needs per capita. We also ignore any potential impact of population growth/decline on per capita incomes, hence per capita volumes (which we take as given as of 2019). Figure 8 lists the top 20 economies in total needs. It includes many African LICs and LMICs with fast population growth (Nigeria, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mozambique). However, the list also includes LMICs and UMICs whose population is not growing as fast but whose volume per capita is higher given the higher incomes there (India, Egypt, Indonesia, and Mexico). Finally, the list includes developed economies with non-nil population growth and high volumes per capita (U.S., Canada, and Australia). Thus, population growth has larger effects when average consumption levels are higher, which may offset the fact that richer nations have slow population growth.

Africa, predicted to account for 58% of global population growth by 2050, now makes up 48% of future global construction needs vs. 26% for developing Asia (7% for developing LAC). Meeting