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

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About 30% of Japan's population lives in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

• Using population estimates from the UN, we compared countries' populations to those of their largest cities.
• In many countries, a large share of the population lives in the biggest city.
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Many countries, like the US and China, have huge populations spread out over a vast area in dozens or hundreds of cities and towns. But in some parts of the world, the big city dominates.

The United Nations provides estimates of the populations of the world's countries and large cities. The database includes estimates for the populations of over 1,800 major urban areas with at least 300,000 residents.

We used the 2019 population estimates for the cities and countries in the database to find the share of each country's population living in its largest city. In addition to being limited to countries that include urban areas 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 largest share of the population living in the biggest city. The countries are geographically spread out, ranging from North Macedonia in Europe to Mongolia in Asia to Argentina in South America. Most of the countries have relatively small populations, but a handful, like Japan, have populations over 100 million.

Here are the countries where a huge share of the population lives in the largest city: