Big neighbours, small neighbours

The most lopsided borders

Microstates top the list, as they must: Vatican City, Monaco, San Marino and Andorra each share a border with a country of tens of millions.^[1][2] The biggest mismatch between two ordinary countries is Bhutan–India: Bhutan, with about 797,000 people, sits between India and China, the two most populous countries on Earth.^[1][2]

Mongolia has the same two giants as its only neighbours, China and Russia, and 394 times fewer people than China.^[1][2]

#	Border	Bigger side, in people
1	Italy and Vatican City	66,798×
2	India and Bhutan	1,837×
3	France and Monaco	1,792×
4	China and Bhutan	1,766×
5	Italy and San Marino	1,727×
6	France and Andorra	829×
7	Spain and Andorra	595×
8	China and Mongolia	394×
9	Brazil and Suriname	333×
10	Mexico and Belize	312×
11	Brazil and Guyana	255×
12	Austria and Liechtenstein	224×

Evenly matched

At the other end are neighbours almost exactly the same size. Finland–Norway is the closest match: 5.65 million people on one side, 5.61 million on the other.^[1]

China–India is on the list too: India has 1.46 billion people to China's 1.41 billion, by the World Bank's latest figures.^[1]

#	Border	Bigger side, in people
1	Finland and Norway	1.01×
2	Rwanda and Burundi	1.01×
3	Austria and Switzerland	1.01×
4	Malawi and Zambia	1.01×
5	Serbia and Bulgaria	1.02×
6	Hungary and Austria	1.03×
7	Haiti and Dominican Republic	1.03×
8	India and China	1.04×

The most crowded neighbourhoods

Add up everyone living in a country's neighbours and Myanmar comes first, with 3.13 billion, because it borders China, India, Bangladesh, Laos and Thailand.^[1][2] Every country in the top ten borders China, India or both.^[2]

#	Country	People next door
1	Myanmar	3.13 billion
2	Pakistan	3.01 billion
3	Nepal	2.87 billion
4	Bhutan	2.87 billion
5	China	2.17 billion
6	India	1.92 billion
7	Afghanistan	1.81 billion
8	Laos	1.65 billion
9	Kazakhstan	1.60 billion
10	North Korea	1.60 billion

Smaller than everyone, bigger than everyone

Thirteen countries with three or more neighbours are bigger than every one of them: India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, Ethiopia, Egypt, the DR Congo, Germany, Thailand, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Algeria and Ghana.^[1][2] Germany is the only one in mainland Europe, ahead of all nine of its neighbours.^[1][2]

And 40 countries with two or more neighbours are smaller than all of them.^[1][2] Some are expected, like Bhutan, Nepal and Mongolia between India, China and Russia; others are not. Norway has fewer people than any of its neighbours, Sweden, Finland and Russia, and Denmark fewer than Germany or Canada.^[1][2]