Born in Aleppo in 1946, he then lived in Beirut. After studying economics and sociology at Université St. Joseph and the Lebanese University in Lebanon, he graduated from the Universities of Sorbonne and Dauphine with a degree in Demography and Urbanism. Since then, his career has been dedicated to research and demography. Notably with the UN in Beirut, Cairo, Yaoundé (Cameroun), Port-au-Prince (Haïti) and Rabat (Morocco). Since 1990, he is the director of research in the Institut national d'études démographiques de Paris. From 2003 to 2005, he was the director of the modern studies department in the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Beirut (IFPO). As an international consultant (Morocco, Palestine, Laos), he is also a professor at the university of Cape Town (South Africa).
His research focused on Arab and Muslim populations, the old and the new minorities in the world and the socio-economic and political implications of the dynamics of populations. He has published around 500 books, chapters, articles and reports, to name a few:
-Youssef Courbage, Hala Naufal, 296 pages, Les Palestiniens dans le monde -une étude démographique, (in Arabic, translation in English) Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Doha, 2020.
-Youssef Courbage, Emmanuel Todd, Le rendez-vous des civilisations, 178 pages, Paris, La République des Idées/Le Seuil, 2007. Translated into Arabic, English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Persian, Korean, Hungarian
-Youssef Courbage, New Demographic scenarios in the Mediterranean Region, 200 pages, WebINED, http://www.ined.fr/englishversion/publications/collections/courbage/td142A.htm, 2002, Original translate in French and Italian.
-Paul Compton, Youssef Courbage, Werner Haug (ed.), 759 pages, The demographic characteristics of immigrant populations in Europe, Conseil de l’Europe, Strasbourg, 2002, and The demographic characteristics of national minorities in certain European States, Volume II, Council of Europe, 1998.
