Birth Rate

Birth Rate, measure of the frequency of births in a given population.

The term also denotes an internationally recognized index, known as the “crude birth rate”: for a calendar year, the crude birth rate is the number of live births in a population over the course of that year divided by the total population at mid-year, or the mean population during the year. The resulting quotient is multiplied by 1,000 to give the birth rate “per thousand”.

Analysis of the size, structure, and likely development of a country’s population or its social groups is important to government administration, non-governmental organizations, and international monitoring and advisory agencies. Monitoring of birth rate facilitates housing and education provision, public health-care regulation, formulation of policies concerning birth control (contraception) programmes, labour management, and industrial and agricultural investment.

The UN Demographic Yearbook (1948— ) is a standard manual of reference. However, assessors from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) and UN recognize the fallibility of fertility and mortality predictions. Accuracy of forecast depends on the adequacy of conjecture drawn from local data rather than from data-processing sophistications as such.

In the following countries, crude birth rates in 1993 varied from 52.5 in Niger, 9.8 in Germany, 31.2 in South Africa, and 33.4 in Papua New Guinea. However, such figures may prove to be unsatisfactory indicators of population growth or decline in regions experiencing large-scale movement, which distorts the settlement pattern by age or sex. Therefore, demographers calculate specific birth rates: that is, an age-specific birth rate, a duration-specific birth rate, an urban birth rate, and so forth; these enable comparisons over time and region to be made.

Cohort birth rates (childbearing propensities of identifiable groups sharing a specific experience) may be assessed at particular times, to calculate childbirth frequency within marital fertility, to assess family size in a given zone, or illegitimate fertility.

“Fertility” in recent demographic usage relates to the actual frequency of births, not of the ability of couples to have children (terms such as “fecundity” or “reproductive capacity” are used in tabulations). A general fertility rate is expressed as a combination of the crude birth rate and the total fertility rate, which is the average number of children women bear. This is below 2.0 in most industrialized countries.