Tonje Sveinunggard

Birth rate and ideology
Tonje Sveinunggard

I have chosen to look at the different variables when it comes to average income, urbanization and school life expectancy in nine different nations. In six of these nine counties are 80 % or more of the population Catholics (marked as blue), the last three are countries that have less than 5 % Catholic citizens (marked as red) and they are all listed below.

Nation	Catholic (%)	Birth rate /1000	Average income	School life expectancy	Urbanization
Ireland	87,4 %	15,5	$42.600	19 years	62.0 %
Italy	80,0 %	8,9	$30.600	16 years	68.0 %
France	83,0 %	12,6	$36.100	16 years	85.0 %
Colombia	90,0 %	17,0	$11.000	14 years	75.0 %
Spain	94,0 %	10,4	$31.000	17 years	77.0 %
Mexico	82,7 %	18,6	$15.600	14 years	78.0 %
Burma	1,0 %	18,9	$1.400	9 years	32.6 %
Somalia	0,0 %	41,45	$600	3 years	37.7 %
Indonesia	3,0 %	17,38	$5.100	13 years	50.7 %

First of all I look at the relationship between percentage of Catholic’s within the nation and their correlation with birth rate. As you can see in the table above, there are at least two evidences suggesting that there is no correlation between the two variables. If you look at Indonesia and Colombia, you will see that they have almost the same numbers of birth rate, but the percentage of Catholic citizens is totally different (90 % and 3 %). Secondly there are also great variations between all of the “blue” countries when it comes to birth rate, even all of the nations are “Catholic nations” with a percentage over 80.

Second I would like to take a look at school life expectancy and how it affects the birth rate – and if it does. There is a trend showing that the longer you go to school, the lower is your birth rate. The only exception here is Ireland. The countries with 9 years and more of education are much lower than Columbia with only 3 years of education, but more than a doubling in birth rate.

Third I want to look at average income and birth rate. As you can see above the lower your income is, the higher is the birth rate. There can be many reasons for this, but I believe that lack of contraception can be one of them. Less wealthy people do also need to have many kids so they can work to earn enough money for survival. The nation with the lowest income is Somalia and here they have twice as high birth rate than the rest.

The last variable I would like to take a look at is the relationship between urbanization and birth rate. In general people tend to think that there is a correlation between many babies and living in small cities. If you take a look at the table, there is actually no clear trend confirming this claim. France, with the highest percentage of urbanization, is not especially low in birth rate. Neither is Mexico with its 78 % of urbanization and a birth rate of 18.6. This is almost as high as Burma with 18.9 and only an urbanization percent of 32. In other words, I cannot see these two variables affecting one another.

Conclusion:  In this research I found that there is no significant relationship between the religion and the birth rate in a nation. There are on the other hand many other variables than the religion that affects the birth rate. Average income stands out as the most important factor in this study.
So even if there is a technologically conservative prohibition against birth control among Catholic nations, there is no clear trend or proof of this. As shown above there are very Catholic countries with lower birth rates, and non-Catholic countries with high(est) birth rate.

Reference: www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html