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For anyone wanting to take a break from the cancer on /pol/, I wanted to find some data on birth rates around the world and share my findings.
Here is some data that I put together regarding fertility rates for virtually every country on Earth. My hypothesis is that income is the most influential factor that affects fertility rates around the world, and this is because of opportunity costs. In plain English, fertility rates in rich countries decline because as income rises, the greater the amount of income that is sacrificed over several years in order to raise children. Therefore, birth rates decline as income rises because although most women would like to have children, the more children a woman has, the more costly it becomes in terms of lost income.
For poor countries, the incentive is exactly the opposite. Whereas in wealth countries there is a rising cost to having a lot of children, in poor countries, there is a very high cost to NOT having children. For a very poor person, more children means that, in time, there will be more hands to work a farm, scavenge, work, etc. Having more children also means having more people to take care of the mother and father in old age when they are unable to work or care for themselves.
The graph I put together in the picture shows what a powerful force income can have on the number of children women choose to have where small changes in income can have a dramatic effect population growth. My theory about this encompasses what I outlined above, but also takes into account changes in real vs. relative income. An increase in income of $500 for someone earning $50,000 is only an increase of 1% where as the same increase for someone earning $500 per year represents an increase of 100%. The graph shows a clear preference for women in all countries to trade off having more children in exchange for having higher income.
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As income grows, the average fertility rate settles around 2 children per woman with a much slower decline as income continues to increase with some degree of variance, which I would attribute to differences in culture, religious beliefs, etc which simple income statistics do not take into account.
Of course the common narrative is that populations of poor countries is very high due to lack of contraception, so this hypothesis needs to be tested as well. In pic related, the hypothesis is that birth rates are a function of contraception prevalence. Data regarding contraception use is rather difficult to reliably obtain, so there are data points that are missing for dozens of countries. The data shows that regardless of contraception prevalence, countries with per capita GDP well above the world average, maintain replacement level birth rates, or close to it even while showing a tremendous amount of variation in contraception prevalence. An alternative theory is that in countries where it is desirable to have many children, contraception usage would be lower anyways because that would be in conflict with the goal of having more children. Contraception prevalence does not take into account the cost of obtaining contraception, but it is possible that it may be irrelevant if it were widely available from international aid organizations for free. This is not to say that there is no correlation, but most of the correlation seems to come from the income effect.
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SOURCES AND DEFINITIONS pt 1
Source: CIA World Factbook 2017
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/index.html
>Fertility rate is the average number of children that would be born per woman if all women lived to the end of their childbearing years and bore children according to a given fertility rate at each age. The total fertility rate (TFR) is a more direct measure of the level of fertility than the crude birth rate, since it refers to births per woman. This indicator shows the potential for population change in the country. A rate of two children per woman is considered the replacement rate for a population, resulting in relative stability in terms of total numbers. Rates above two children indicate populations growing in size and whose median age is declining.
The reason I chose this statistic is because it expresses population growth on a per-woman basis which, when aggregated, suggests that family size is mostly a matter of choice.
>GDP dollar estimates for countries are reported both on an official exchange rate (OER) and a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis. Both measures contain information that is useful to the reader. The PPP method involves the use of standardized international dollar price weights, which are applied to the quantities of final goods and services produced in a given economy. The data derived from the PPP method probably provide the best available starting point for comparisons of economic strength and well-being between countries.
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The reason I chose this statistic is because, although GDP per capita has problems as an economic measuring tool, it is far preferable to median household income which is based on income earned by all members of a household and would create distorted data since household size can vary drastically from country to country. GDP/capital on a PPP basis at least corrects for varying household size and prices between countries. There are some problems with using GDP per capita in that it does not correct for outliers such as Qatar, Luxemborg and a few others where median household or individual income is realistically far below per capital GDP.
>Contraception prevalence is the percent of women of reproductive age (15-49) who are married or in union and are using, or whose sexual partner is using, a method of contraception according to the date of the most recent available data.
I used this statistic because it is the only consistent data that I could find on birth control usage since the term “availability” is such an ambiguous and undefined term.
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Bamp
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