Simen Lossius Ellefsen - Assignment #3: Birth rate and ideology

Below I will present my findings from the research. And, I will draw a conclusion based on whether high birth rates is influenced by prohibition towards contraceptives in Catholicism, or if it is influenced by other factors.

Country	% of Catholics	Birth rate of 1,000 population	Death rate of 1,000 population	Infant Mortality Rate, 1,000 live births	Life expectancy at birth	Average Income	Average Educational level	Unemployment rate
Italy	80	8.94	10.01	3.33	81.95	$24,216	16	10.6
Poland	89.8	9.88	10.31	6.3	76.45	$20,900	15	12.8
Argentina	92	17.12	7.35	10.24	77.32	$18,400	16	7.2
Spain	94	10.14	8.94	3.35	81.37	$22,847	17	25.1
Brazil	73.6	14.97	6.51	19.83	73.02	$12,100	14	5.5
Colombia	90	16.98	5.33	15.46	75.02	$11,000	14	10.4
Norway	<1	10.8	9.21	3.47	80.44	$55,900	18	3.2
Niger	<1	46.84	13.07	87.98	54.34	$800	5	N/A
Iceland	2.5	13.15	7.07	3.17	81.11	$39,900	18	6

The countries in «bold» are the ones without a high percentage of Catholicism

Conclusion

After examining the data from my chart, where six out of nine countries are characterized as Catholic, I could not find a significant correlation between the ideology and high birth rate. However, there were some other factors which correlated with high birth rates. I will now look further into these.

Due to the prohibition of artificial birth control in the Catholic society, one might assume that the lack of contraceptives could cause a high birth rate among Catholics. However, this is not correct. There seems to be no correlation between the ideology and high birth rates. The main factor for causing high birth rate, according to my research, is the infant mortality. The high rate of infant mortality seems to be influenced by the lack of development and poverty. E.g., the people of Niger who suffers from a high infant mortality rate, needs to give multiple births in order to succeed with “spreading” the genes on. Therefore creating high birth rates. This seems to be equally in the Catholic countries which do have a birth rate over the average, e.g Colombia, Argentina and Brazil. However, many of these countries is industrialized, but a lot of the population still lives in poverty.

Another factor which arise in the face of high birth rates is income. The lower the average income is, the the higher the birth rates are. If you look at Spain, Italy, Norway and Iceland, you will se that they have relative high average income, and thus have low birth rates. So, as a generalization, one may say that high birth rates is influenced by factors as poverty and underdevelopment, and not by religion.

References:

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