LOW BIRTH RATE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 May 1940, Page 6

LOW BIRTH RATE

TOO FEW FEMALES IN NEW ZEALAND. POPULATION FIGURES. It is rather remarkable that the Centennial should be marked by the emergence of a condition whereby retrogression of New Zealand's European population should be imminent, states the “Commerce Journal." It suggests that female births are too few for the maintenance of a population increase except by immigration. In the late ’sixties there were 215 children born alive annually in New Zealand per 1000 women of reproductive age, it is pointed out. By 1901 this figure had fallen to 111, and today it is 72. The effects of this drastic decline

in actual fecundity have 'been somewhat offset by the fact that death rates have declined, 100. From about 12J per 1000 in the late ’sixties and 91 at the turn of the century, the crude death rate has dropped to around 8 per 1000. New Zealand has long enjoyed the distinction of possessing the lowest death rate of infant mortality (from over 100 in the ’eighties it has now dropped to 32 per 1000 children born alive). The average expectation of life at age in New Zealand( which in the early nineties was 55.3 years for males and 58.1 years for females) had risen by 1931 to 57.7 for males and 58.8 %r females. The number of people who died in 1938 in New Zealand was 9.7 per 1000 of population. ’ and the number of infants born alive in that year was 17.9

per 1000 of population, so that it would seem that we had a rate of natural increase of 8.2 per 1000 of population in that year. Such a figure might not suggest that stationary populations are imminent. When, however, consideration is given to the fact that New Zealand has at present—mainly owing to factors concerned with its peopling in the past—an exceptionally large proportion of its total population at the ages when mortality rates are low and when reproductivity is high, any reason for complacency vanishes. Actually since about 1932 insufficient female children have been born to our female population to maintain our present numbers, assuming current, rates of mortality and reproduction at the different age groups are perpetuated;

and as soon as the present bulge in our population in early and middle adult life (mainly due to the much higher birth rates formerly prevailing) passes into the older age groups (with their higher mortality and their lower reproductivity) New Zealand's population' will begin to decline —unless the gaps are filled by immigration. New Zealand's crude death rate (which was actually as low as 7.99 per 100 in 1933) is already rising in sympathy with increasing proportions of our population in the older age groups, continues the “Commerce Journal." In 1936 the Kuczynski net reproduction rate of the New Zealand population was .967; that is to say. where 1000 fe-

male children are required to be born annually in order to keep our population just stationary (assuming present rates of reproduction and mortality at different age groups are maintained), only 967 females were born in that year. As recently at 1921-22 the net reproduction rate was as high at 1.29.