World News 30 nations where much (or most!) of the population lives in one city, like Israel, Japan, and Greece

• Using population estimates from the UN, we compared countries’ populations to those of their largest cities.
• In numerous nations, a big share of the population resides in the biggest city.
• See Company Expert’s homepage for more stories

Lots of countries, like the US and China, have actually substantial populations expanded over a vast location in dozens or hundreds of cities and towns. However in some parts of the world, the big city controls.

The United Nations provides estimates of the populations of the world’s countries and big cities The database includes estimates for the populations of over 1,800 significant metropolitan locations with at least 300,000 residents.

We used the 2019 population estimates for the cities and nations in the database to find the share of each country’s population living in its largest city. In addition to being limited to nations that include metropolitan locations with populations over 300,000, we also excluded city-states like Singapore and sub-regions of countries, like Hong Kong, China and Puerto Rico, United States.

We found the 30 countries with the biggest share of the population living in the greatest city. The nations are geographically spread out, varying from North Macedonia in Europe to Mongolia in Asia to Argentina in South America. Many of the nations have relatively little populations, however a handful, like Japan, have populations over 100 million.

Here are the nations where a huge share of the population resides in the biggest city: