Declining Birth Rates and Mortality Causes: An Analysis
Why have both birth and fertility rates decreased? Today, we consider the reasons to be many and complex, with economic causes (cost of parenting, increased income level), sociological, cultural, and institutional reasons, not to mention strictly demographic ones. At present, the development of industrialization, urbanization, and secularization are highlighted, along with other factors such as:
- The emancipation of women and their incorporation into the labor market.
- The cost of education and parenting.
- The birth behavior of each generation, the result of life experience.
The birth rate in Spain cannot be separated from the various historical events it has traversed: the Civil War, migration, economic crises (autarky), changes in age structure, nuptiality changes, etc. If the reasons for the decline are varied and complex, the recovery seen in recent years is related to the entry of the immigrant population. Thus, of the 482,957 births that occurred in 2006, 16.5% (79,688) were to foreign mothers, and 19.3% of the total births were to couples in which at least one of the parents was foreign.
Causes of Mortality Behavior
a) External Factors: In the past, when catastrophic mortality ruled, the causes were due to subsistence crises, famines, epidemics, war, etc., whose appearance cyclically stagnated the population, despite high birth rates.
b) Endogenous Causes: Currently, the causes of death are related to degenerative diseases in old age and social ills or the lifestyle of today’s society; these include diseases of the circulatory and digestive systems, and violent deaths (traffic accidents, murders, suicides, etc.). Therefore, the predominant causes of mortality in our country can be summarized quite well with the famous “three Cs” (heart, cancer, and road). Mortality is concentrated in older age strata and more among men than among women.
The natural population growth is the mechanism that regulates the changes in the volume of a stock from experiencing birth and mortality behavior.
Changes in Natural Growth
In order to explain the evolution of fertility and mortality, the so-called demographic transition theory has been formulated. This theory describes the transition from the previous demographic system, characterized by high birth and mortality rates causing slow growth, to a new system of modern demographic balance with slow growth, but now because of reduced birth and mortality rates. Between these periods, there would be a transitional phase of high growth, due to a decline in mortality before birth rates decline. The causes of the demographic transition have been related to processes of social modernization, cultural changes, and especially economic factors.
The demographic transition has a certain uniqueness in Spain compared to other European countries, as embodied in the much later reduction of mortality and birth rates; hence, the time of maximum growth of the Spanish population was delayed nearly a century compared to some European countries. The behavior of natural motion also presents regional differences: its most prominent feature is the opposition of some communities that maintain positive increases (Canary Islands, Madrid, Murcia, and Andalusia) over others with very weak or negative increments.