Maria Tomren

Birth Rate and Ideology

The purpose of this assignment is to investigate the impact of catholic ideology on a country's birth rates. The countries chosen for this comparison are Italy, Spain, Belgium, Mexico, Argentina and the Philippines which have a catholic population of at least 75 %, and the countries Greece, Indonesia and Sweden with catholic populations of 3 percent or less. In addition to percentage of catholic population, the variables infant mortality rate, life expectancy at birth, school life expectancy, maternal mortality rate and GDP per capita is used as independent variables to describe variations in birth rate.

	Italy	Spain	Belgium	Mexico	Argentina	Philippines	Greece	Indonesia	Sweden
Catholic population	80 %	94 %	75 %	82.7 %	92 %	82.9 %	> 0.7 %	3 %	> 3 %
Birth rate per 1,000	8.94	10.14	10	18.61	17.12	24.62	8.94	17.38	10.2
Infant mortality rate per 1,000	3.33	3.35	4.23	16.26	10.24	18.19	4.85	26.06	4.14
Life expectancy at birth	81.95	81.37	79.78	76.86	77.32	72.21	80.18	71.9	78.94
School life expectancy	16	17	16	14	16	11	16	13	17
Maternal mortality rate per 100,000	4	6	8	50	77	99	3	220	12
GDP per capita	$30,600	$31,100	$38,500	$15,600	$18,400	$4,500	$24,900	$5,100	$38,300

From studying the statistics, we can observe that similar countries, such as the European countries Italy, Spain, Belgium, Greece and Sweden have similar birth rates that are apperantly independent of the percentage of catholic populations. The non-European countries Mexico, Argentina, Philippines and Indonesia have substantially higher birth rates than the European countries, but the difference appears to be more related to lower health standards (higher infant mortality rate, and maternal mortality rate), economic factors (lower GDP per capita) and lower education (shorter school life expectancy) than with the catholic percentage of the population.

Using ordinary least squares to evaluate the independent variable's effect on birth rate, two variables are statistically significant with a p-value of less than 5 percent. These two variables are catholic population and life expectancy. If the test is run again with just these variables, their coefficients are 0.0557 and -1.44 respectively. These two factors explain 93 percent of the variation in birth rates.

This shows that a higher percentage of catholics in a country is indeed positively related with the birth rate, implying that the prohibition against birth contraceptives is indeed a cultural factor that increases birth rates. However the impact of ideology is small compared to the impact of life expectancy which is negatively correlated with birth rates. A high life expectancy implies good overall good health in the population and a more stable environment, so it is expected that high life expectancy is negatively correlated with birth rates. High life expectancy is probably dependent on the other independent variables, so this is could explain why these are not statistically significant in this analysis, even though they probably do affect birth rate in reality.

So even though religious ideology has some impact on the birth rate in a country, other factors such as health which life expectancy has much higher importance in explaining differences in birth rates.