Cathrine Rieber

Assignment 3 – Birthrate and ideology                                  

Cathrine Rieber

In order to answer the assignment, I have collected data from the World Factbook.

	Italy	Spain	Mexico	Brazil	Philippines	France
Roman Catholic (%)	80.0 %	94.0 %	82.7 %	73.6%	80.9%	85.5%
Birthrate  (%)	0.89 %	1.01 %	1.86 %	1.49%	2.46 %	1.26 %
Death rate (%)	0.10 %	0.89 %	0.49 %	0.65%	0.49 %	0.89 %
Infant Mortality Rate (%)	0.33 %	0.35 %	1.62 %	1.98%	1.89 %	0.33 %
Life expectancy rate	81.95	81.37	76.86	73.02	72.21	81.56
Avrg. yearly income ($)	29.812	30.058	15.363	11.747	4.380	35.295
Avrg. Educ. level (yr.)	16 yrs	17 yrs	14 yrs	14 yrs	11 yrs	16 yrs
Education in % of GDP	4.7 %	5.0 %	5.3 %	5.6 %	2.7 %	5.9 %

	India	Algeria	Iceland
Roman Catholic (%)	0.0 %	>1.0 %	2.5 %
Birthrate  (%)	2.0 %	2.42 %	1.31 %
Death rate (%)	0.74 %	0.43 %	0.70 %
Infant Mortality Rate (%)	4.5 %	2.26 %	0.31 %
Life expectancy rate	67.48	76.18	81.11
Avrg. yearly income ($)	3.843	7.268	39.718
Avrg. Educ. level (yr.)	11 yrs	14 yrs	18 yrs
Education in % of GDP	3.3 %	3.6 %	7.8 %

If we look at the relationship between the percentage of Roman Catholic citizens and the corresponding birth rates in each country, we see that the birth rates vary a lot regardless of the religion in the countries. The Catholic countries even tend to have lower birth rates than the nations with a low percentage of Catholics, which interferes with the reasonable assumption that nations with large Catholic populations would have high birth rates due to the absence of birth control measures.

Let me emphasize this with an example: In Mexico, 82.7% of the population is Roman Catholic whilst India’s population has no percentage of Roman Catholics. Even so, the birthrates in the two nations are almost equal: Mexico has a birthrate of 18.61 births per 1000 population and India 20.24 births per 1000 population. This indicates that there is not a strong relation between these two variables and that there are other contributing factors that affect the birthrates than the absence of artificial birth control measures.

If we look at the average income in the different nations, there tends to be a pattern in the relation between birthrates and average income. The countries that have a lower average income tend to have a higher birthrate than the countries with a high income, and vice versa. Algeria for example, which has an average yearly income of $ 7.268, has a birthrate of 24.2 births per 1000 population, whilst Italy who has an average income of $ 29.812 has a birthrate of 8.9 births per 1000 population. As we see, there is a stronger correlation between birthrates and average income than with religion. Reasons for this might be the differences in cultures – in some countries it is looked upon as a privilege to have many children, whilst in other countries there is more focus on career etc.

Looking at the infant mortality rates compared to birthrates, I found that there is quite a strong correlation. Italy for instance, has a fairly low infant mortality rate (0.33%) and a birth rate of 8.9 births per 1000 population. India on the other hand, has a much higher infant mortality rate at 4.5% and also a higher birthrate at 20 births per 1000 population. This indicates that a higher infant mortality rate leads to a higher birth rate. The reason for this might be that the possibility of loosing a child results in more births in order to be secure that you will have some children that grow up.

To summarize, the amount of Roman Catholic in a country seems to have a weak correlation with the birth rates within a country. Even though there is a technologically conservative prohibition against artificial birth control among practitioners of Catholicism, this prohibition does not really seem to exist in behavior. Other factors such as average yearly income, infant mortality, average education level and life expectancy rate seems to have a stronger relation and effect on birthrates.

-       https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

-       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita