Does Ethiopia have more people than Germany?

Germany is the most populous country in the European Union and one of the world’s biggest economies, so it is easy to assume it outnumbers Ethiopia. In fact Ethiopia has far more people: about 135 million against 83.5 million in the World Bank’s 2025 estimates, 1.6 times as many. Ethiopia ranks tenth in the world by population in our deck, Germany nineteenth. Economic weight and fame are no guide to headcount. This pair is unusual in another way, because the larger population is not the more crowded one. Germany has about 239 people per km² of land, against about 121 in Ethiopia. Ethiopia simply has much more room, about 1.1 million km² of land, more than three times Germany’s 349,000 km², so it holds more people at a lower density.