Wednesday, 11 April 2007

Population decline - an update

According to a New Scientist report, Denmark has been successful in reversing the general European trend towards lower brith rates. The reason for this success is a greater use of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). Artificial reproductive technology is heavily subsidised in Denmark and widely accepted, with the result that 4.2% of babies born in Denmark are the result of these technologies, compared with 1.4% in the UK and 1.2% in the US.

Denmark's birth rate is now 1.9 children per woman, making it one of the highest in Europe, and close to the replacement rate considered to be 2.1.

However some experts are concerned that rapidly increasing the birth rate in consumer societies is not the right way to go about dealing the problems caused by an aging population.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for your interesting post!
    I thought perhaps you may also find this related publication interesting to you:

    Aging of Population

    http://longevity-science.org/Population_Aging.htm

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you very much for that link. A very interesting article.

    ReplyDelete

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