Friday, April 16, 2010

A few Friday links

Today's my day for links-writing, I suppose, but in my defense I've got quite a lot of good ones!


  • Continuing yesterday's United Arab Emirates theme, rising immigration and the advance of the demographic transition among Emiratis is projected to diminish the Emirati share of the UAE's population from 20 to 15% over the next two decades.

  • Immigration and high birth rates mean that Sweden's population is projected to reach 10 million in 2021.

  • Birth rates in Wales are rising, straining existing maternity and childcare services.

  • Birth rates in the United States fell by 2% in 2008, perhaps because of the economic crash.

  • Immigration has helped boost South Korea's population by a half-million, significantly more than projections had indicated.

  • Despite a very low birthrate, and ongoing depopulation in its northern regions, Romania's population is projected to be fairly young by European standards in 2030.

  • Some 13% of Maliens have emigrated from their country, most living in neighbouring nations like Côte d'Ivoire but with substantial contingents in Europe, especially France.

  • In French, the Canadian Press notes that Québec's birth rate has reached new highs, with nearly 89 thousand births this year, although the fertility rate has remained stable, with the population expected to reach some 9 million.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The U.S. birth rate seems to have fallen further in 2009.

The TFR was about 2.08 in 2008 (down from something like 2.1 or 2.11 in 2007) so it is lower from that level in 2009.

Catamaran Cameraman said...

Projecting UAE population figures that far out is probably a waste of time. Nobody's even sure how many people live in the country today - I've seen estimates as far apart as 4.5 and 7 million people. Future growth will depend heavily on oil prices, which are themselves unpredictable.

Randy McDonald said...

@ Anonymous: That doesn't necessarily follow. As the Québec news article I linked to noted, the absolute number of births rose despite fertility rates remaining static.

@ Dubaiwalla: The figures vary that much? OK, did not know that.

CB said...

Yeah, it's about population growth. the fertility can sink even if the number of births rises, if the number of 15-45 aged females has risen more quickly than the number of births. So if the number of births in the USA has shrunken in 2009 the fertility rate may hyave shrunken even more.

First poster/anonymous said...

Randy is correct that an decrease in the absolute number of births would not always indicate a decline the fertility rate.

I thought that the CDC had a fertility rate for parts of 2009 so I checked its website and found that for January-July of 2009(66.8) the fertility rate was lower than in January-July of 2008 (68.3). In this case it appears that, at least for the, the first half of 2009, fertility rates moved downwards from the levels seen in the same months in 2008.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_15.htm