The following chart illustrates the relationship between contraceptive use and the total fertility rate by regions of the world. Increased contraceptive use is associated with lower numbers of children per woman.
Mortality Mortality is a reference to the finite nature of humanity: people die. Mortality in demography is interested in the number of deaths in a given time or place or the proportion of deaths in relation to a population. Some of the more common demographic measures of mortality include: •
crude death rate: the annual number of deaths per 1000 people
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infant mortality rate: the annual number of deaths of children less than 1 year old per thousand live births
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life expectancy: the number of years which an individual at a given age can expect to live at present mortality rates Note that the crude death rate as defined above and applied to a whole population can give a misleading impression. For example, the number of deaths per 1000 people can be higher for developed nations than in less-developed countries, despite standards of health being better in developed countries. This is because developed countries have relatively more older people, who are more likely to die in a given year, so that the overall mortality rate can be higher even if the mortality rate at any given age is lower. A more complete picture of mortality is given by a life table which summarises mortality separately at each age. This chart depicts infant mortality by region of the world. The less developed regions of the world have higher infant mortality rates than the more developed regions. 90