Study Note - The Development Gap – Using Crude Birth Rates and Death Rates

The AQA GCSE geography specification states that birth rates and death rates can be used as measures of development. So how are these calculated, and what actual use can they be in determining how well developed a country is?

Well, the crude birth and death rates are very easy to calculate. They are the number of births or deaths in a given year per 1000 of the total population, and therefore the calculation will be expressed as:

B/P × 1000

where B = the number of births, and P = the total population.

This is a crude birth rate as it is not adjusted to take into account the proportion of the population which is of childbearing age, and therefore it is very difficult to compare crude rates between two very different populations.

Often, demographers prefer to use a standardised birth rate which indicates what the birth rate would have been if the age and gender composition of a particular population were the same as in a population that has been selected as standard.

Similarly, a standardised death rate compares the death rate with a real or assumed population which is held to be standard.

So what use can analysing birth and death rates be in measuring development?

Death rates have been declining in all areas of the world except for the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the past forty years, and this fall is often attributed to improvements in health care and sanitation, thus raising living standards.

Falling birth rates can be a sign that the education of women is improving, or that a country is in stage five of the Demographic Transition Model with an ageing population. It can be useful to determine where a country is on the DTM when assessing development, although, as with the birth and death rates the Model makes no comment on the effects of migration, and some countries that are highly affected by disease, such as Malawi and the Sudan, do not easily fit into any stage of the DTM.