Problems Arise from Changing Birth Rates
By Bella Liang, Kylee Peng, Fernando Anguiano
Infant mortality has been an issue since prehistoric times, but thanks to modern technology and vast improvements in healthcare, we see much fewer cases of infant mortality occurring around the world. Although there’s a steady decline in infant mortality rates, however, it cannot be dismissed as resolved. In 2018, the USA’s infant mortality rate was 5.7 deaths per 1000 live births, and the rate disproportionally affects communities of color (CDC, 2020). We wanted to explore the relationship between infant mortality and birth rates across regions of the world to visualize this issue, and we chose the World Development Indicators dataset from the World Bank as our data source. The World Bank aims to highlight and overcome challenges, such as poverty, sustainability, economic growth, etc., by collecting and presenting data. In the rest of this article, we’ll dive deeper and draw correlations of birth rate with infant mortality rate and an aging population among nations of the world to see if this issue can be resolved.
How Birth Rates Affect Infant Mortality
Upon researching some more about infant mortality rates, we found research arguing that if child mortality rates are reduced, then birth rates will eventually decline as well. The paper raises a question of whether or not establishing family planning laws that affect birth rates could potentially slow the growing population, and in turn slow down infant mortality rates as the government expends more into family planning and healthcare (Haines, 1998). There seems to be an undeniable relationship between infant mortality rate and birth rate, so we visualized this correlation using a scatter plot with three visual attributes: birth rate along the x-axis, infant mortality rate along the y-axis, and region by color (Few, 2019).
By visualizing each country’s infant mortality rate and birth rate, we can clearly identify a positive correlation between the two variables. Higher infant mortality rates clearly correlate with higher birth rates. By categorizing each country into a specific region, we can also identify geographical trends within this relationship. Countries with higher infant mortality and birth rates tend to be in Africa, while countries with lower rates tend to be in Europe.
Although our analysis in this section focuses on infant mortality rates and birth rates, to analyze the two without considering other associating factors would provide an incomplete narrative to the issue. In our research, we found a paper that explores the potential complication of reverse causality between infant mortality and birth rates (Raivio, 1990). Evidence shows us that a higher birth rate leads to higher infant mortality rates, but the situation reversed may not hold true. A declining infant mortality rate may or may not induce lower fertility rates. It’s important to also mention several confounding factors, as higher infant mortality rates are also associated with a poor economy, lack of education, reduced care from parents, etc.
Birth Rate and Aging Populations
Now that we’ve established the undeniable correlation between infant mortality and birth rates, we’re interested in how the overall population shifts in response to birth rates. Is there a relationship between birth rates and the age of the overall population? How might lower birth rates affect the overall population distribution?
Population distribution is a factor that we must consider in this analysis of birth rates and infant mortality. With higher birth rates, a population would naturally shift towards a younger demographic. However, what happens when there are not enough births, or when there are high mortality rates such that a population is shifting towards an elderly demographic?
To understand this situation a little more, we began our research again to learn that an aging population means that there are fewer people of working age, which causes harm to the economy when there are not enough workers to fill open roles (Borji, 2020). Also, as the population ages, there would be increasing demand for health care systems. It’s difficult for struggling economies to dedicate more funds to health care when its other sectors need attention and improvement, too (Borji, 2020).
How does this tie into a country’s birth rates? To understand the relationship between birth rates and an aging population, we created a visualization that showcased the countries that are most at risk of a declining workforce. The visualization below compares the percentage of a country’s population above 65 years old, below 14 years old, and their birth rate per 1000 people. We established criteria to determine which countries are most at risk. We define a country as being “most at risk of an aging population and declining workforce” if the country is (1) below the 10th percentile for birth rates, (2) below the 10th percentile for the percentage of the population below 14 years old, and (3) above the 90th percentile for the percentage of the population above 65 years old. These three factors combined would allow us to filter through countries that have low birth rates, a low population of children, and a high population of elders.
In this visualization, we’ve highlighted the nine most vulnerable countries at risk of a declining workforce in red. It’s interesting to note that these countries, including Japan, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland are well-developed countries mostly located in Europe, while the countries leading in higher birth rates and infant mortality rates are mostly underdeveloped. It was interesting to find that the countries facing an issue with a declining workforce are actually on the opposite spectrum of economic stability and even geographical location when compared to those struggling with higher infant mortality rates.
Unique Problems within Developing and Developed Countries
The two visualizations above give us a better idea of how changes in birth rate, along with other measures like infant mortality rate and population distribution, leads to different problems within the country. As discussed by Haines (1998), the changes in birth rate and infant mortality rate are indicative of the development process of each country, with developing countries exhibiting particularly high rates of birth and infant mortality. Research demonstrates that these high rates may indicate problems with access to education, family planning resources, and methods of contraception in developing countries (UN, 2009). As shown in our analysis of low birth rate and high elderly population, developed countries also face the unique challenge of a declining workforce. Thus, the relationships we observe in these development indicators highlight varying problems in both developing and developed countries. A geographical relationship also exists between the correlations we found. Highlighted in the visualization below are developing countries, with high rates of infant mortality and birth, and developed countries vulnerable to a declining workforce. Distinguished by each visual mark’s color, we visualize the nominal variable of geographical region and observe that developing countries are mostly in Africa, while the cluster of developed countries is mostly in Europe (Sedig & Parsons, 2016).
Conclusion
By utilizing the World Development Indicators dataset provided by the World Bank, we were able to gain a better understanding of the relationship between birth rates and infant mortality rates, seeing that there is a correlation between a high birth rate and a high infant mortality rate. We were also able to identify which countries/regions would be most affected by their aging population and low birth rate. Lastly, we pointed out the problems that separate the developing countries, which are mostly in Africa, from the developed countries, which are mostly in Europe. Although our findings may call out certain countries, placing them at higher risk for being greatly affected by a declining workforce, we understand that it would be difficult to immediately change each country’s population distribution in order to counteract this trend. Though the effects of a declining workforce may not be apparent in the short term, we believe that it is a problem that these countries should be more informed about, giving them enough time to create policies that would help them avoid a failing economy and/or overwhelmed healthcare system. With the information and visualizations that we have presented, we hope to inform the world about these relationships in the data, as well as the potential problems that we recognized after much research and data analysis.
References
Borji, H. S. (2020, August 28). 4 Global Economic Issues of an Aging Population. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011216/4-global-economic-issues-aging-population.asp
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020, September 10). Infant Mortality. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/infantmortality.htm
Few, S. (2019, September). The Perceptual and Cognitive Limits of Multivariate Data Visualization. https://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=2957
Haines, M. R. (1998). The Relationship Between Infant and Child Mortality and Fertility: Some Historical and Contemporary Evidence for the United States. In M. R. Montgomery & B. Cohen (Eds.), From Death to Birth: Mortality Decline and Reproductive Change. National Academies Press. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233807/
Raivio K. (1990). [How does infant mortality affect birth rates?]. Duodecim; Laaketieteellinen Aikakauskirja, 106(17):1187–1189. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1670537/
Sedig, K., & Parsons, P. (2016). Conceptual Elements of Framework. In Design of visualizations for human-information interaction: A pattern-based framework (pp. 33–45). San Rafael, California (1537 Fourth Street, San Rafael, CA 94901 USA): Morgan & Claypool
United Nations. (2009, April 1). High birth rates hamper development in poorer countries, warns UN forum. United Nations News. https://news.un.org/en/story/2009/04/295732-high-birth-rates-hamper-development-poorer-countries-warns-un-forum