Creative Director
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Population figures listed for settlements do not include populations of rural areas (they would include folks living just outside city walls, though).
While exact numbers for populations in a nation are not something we have designed or revealed, you can certainly look at the sum total of population numbers for significant cities listed in an entry in the Inner Sea World Guide as representational, and also as ratios. While the total number of people living in the nation of Jalmeray and the total number living in Geb aren't numbers we've revealed... you can total up the numbers listed in the Inner Sea World Guide's capital and notable settlements.
This gives you 170,780 folks in Geb and 25,380 folks in Jalmeray.
That doesn't mean that's a hard and fast number of people in either region (it's just the total of the settlements of note), but you can look at those numbers and infer that, since Geb's number is about 7 times as large as Jalmeray's that the total population of Geb is about 7 times greater than the total population of Jalmeray.
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I really ought to browse this forum more often . . .
If you have a lot of time on your hands and are willing to make assumptions about the map projection, you can drop a hex grid over the Inner Sea Region map. The kingdom-building rules in Kingmaker (Ultimate Campaign is oddly silent on the subject) say a claimed hex has about 250 people in it before settlement population. So you take your hex grid, count the number of hexes, multiply by 250, and add settlement populations.
I haven't done this for all of the Inner Sea Region, but I have done it for Cheliax, and I came up with a total population of about 1.6 million, not including Isger. That population is about 22% urbanized (where "urbanized" means "living in settlements with a population greater than 5,000). Taking this approach at face value makes Golarion a Tippyverse, with the population clustered in cities between which communication and trade is either magical or difficult. That might appeal to people who consider a Tippyverse the logical endpoint for D&D Third Edition-style games.
There are obvious problems with this approach, however. First, the "countryside" population is almost certainly not smoothly distributed. Terrain type and history will see people cluster around certain areas. Second, "countryside" population is likely underestimated, because it starts from Kingmaker's numbers and Kingmaker is set in a sparsely-populated frontier. You can handwave those problems away by assuming that differences across terrains will even out over large enough areas, and revising the multiplier upward. Assuming 750 people per hex before settlements rather than 250, for example, gives Cheliax a population of about 4 million and an urbanization rate of about 8.5%. There isn't a lot of foundation for that 750 number (a single settlement lot has about 250 people in it according to Ultimate Campaign, so it makes a kind of intuitive sense to use that number for whole hexes) but the results seem a lot more in line with the setting builders' intent.
There is a flaw to this method that can't be cured by janking the multiplier around, though. No matter what, it swallows Thorps, Hamlets, and Villages.