Today's adults grew up in different decades, so the gap between a country's youngest cohort (19-year-olds in 2019) and all its adults shows how much growing conditions improved in recent decades.
Fastest-growing (countries with 5M+ adults): China +6.1 cm (men) / +5.7 cm (women), South Korea +5.0 / +5.4, Hong Kong +4.9 / +3.8, Thailand +4.8 / +4.7, Vietnam +4.3 / +4.7. Türkiye: +2.9 / +3.8. A 19-year-old Chinese man is 6 cm taller than the average Chinese adult man.
Stalled: Mozambique (+0.1), Benin (+0.2), and in Papua New Guinea young men are slightly shorter (−0.2 cm). Over the past century, adult height decreased or at best stayed the same in many sub-Saharan African countries, and gains have plateaued in South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and India. [1]
A century: For cohorts born 1896–1996, the largest gains were South Korean women (+20.2 cm) and Iranian men (+16.5 cm). [1]
Do adults shrink? Slightly, after 40 (we model 0.08 cm/year for men, 0.1 cm for women), so a small part of the gaps above is ageing rather than generational change — it doesn't change the ranking between countries.
👉 Where do you rank in your country and the world? heightscore.com/en
Method: see heightscore.com/en/methodology.
Source
- NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (2016). A century of trends in adult human height. eLife 5:e13410.