Births, economic growth, mortality and murder in a developing country

Paul A Bourne

doi:10.4236/health.2012.42009

Abstract

Background: In 1960, total fertility rate in Jamaica was 5.6 children per woman which declined by 57.5% in 2008. The reduction in fertility is primarily attributable to contraceptive measures; but murder and other selected macroeconomic variables have never been included in the literature. Objectives: This study examines murder, mortality, and selected macroeconomic variables are factors of births, using data for Jamaica from 1989-2009. Methods: The study is a secondary data analysis of statistics on Jamaica from 1989 - 2009 but also includes data on births from 1900s. Find- ings: In the decade of the 1950s, births increased by 79.9% over the decade of 1900s, grew by 22.4% in the 1960s over the previous decade and declined by 17.6% in 2000s compared with the 1990s. Four emerged as statistically significant predictors of lnbirth—inflation, GDP per capita growth, mortality and murder, with an explanatory power of 90.6%—F = 19.291, P s = 0.962), when murder was excluded and replaced by annual exchange rate, the factors influencing lnbirth was exchange rate, inflation, unemployment, GDP per capita growth and mortality—all factors account for 92.2% of the variability in lnbirth—F = 30.572, P < 0.0001. Conclusion: Murder is more that a crime it is a cause of birth decline, suggesting that public health practitioners as well as epidemiologists must take this factor into account as it is a birth determinant.

Highlights

The study of birth has a long history in demography [1,2,3,4], which dates back to its beginning in the late seventeenth century [5]
Empirical evidence showed that total fertility rate in the 1960s was 5.6 per woman in Jamaica and this has dramatically declined to 2.4 per women in 2008; in 2009, 69 out of every 100 births occurred to women less than 30 years and the crude birth rate in 2010 was 15.96 compared to 16.69 in 2010 [6,7]
Of the five variables initially tested in hypothesis 5, four emerged as statistically significant predictors of lnbirth—inflation, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita growth, mortality and murder, with an explanatory power of 90.6%—F = 19.291, P < 0.0001 (Table 5)

Summary

Introduction

The study of birth has a long history in demography [1,2,3,4], which dates back to its beginning in the late seventeenth century [5]. The reduction in fertility per woman has been attributable to family planning measures which were introduced in the 1970s [8]. Like in Jamaica, family planning measures in China, Africa and other developing nations are responsible for the reduction in population growth rate [9,10,11,12,13]. Ascribing family planning measures to the decline in fertility is accepting that there are determinants of births (or factors affecting fertility). The reduction in fertility is primarily attributable to contraceptive measures; but murder and other selected macroeconomic variables have never been included in the literature. Objectives: This study examines murder, mortality, and selected macroeconomic variables are factors of births, using data for Jamaica from 1989-2009. Conclusion: Murder is more that a crime it is a cause of birth decline, suggesting that public health practitioners as well as epidemiologists must take this factor into account as it is a birth determinant

Objectives

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion