With Reference to Named Countries, How and Why Do Birth Rates and Life Expectancy /death Rates Vary Between Hic’s and Lic’s?

With reference to named countries, how and why do birth rates and life expectancy /death rates vary between HIC’s and LIC’s?

Population across the world differs vastly; this is especially shown when looking at countries of Low Income (LIC) and High Income (HIC). Many different factors can affect a country's population, the foremost variables include Life expectancy (the average number of years a newborn child can expect to live for), the Death rate and Birth rate (the number of live births/deaths per year) and these are the factors which largely affects the Natural Population change and shows us that by a country having a high death rate, the life expectancy is low causing there to be rapid population changes. This is presented on the demographic transition model and clearly explains the progress through 5 stages. Often, the factors affecting birth rate include political, social and economic reasons whereas the death rate is often linked with the social, political, physical and economical factors. The other factors affecting these initial variables include availability of education; health care, high infant mortality rates and the widespread of diseases such as AIDS and HIV.

Compared to HIC’s, the birth rate is very high in LIC’s. This is often due to social and cultural issues. An example being, countries which hold strong Islamic or Catholic beliefs such as Pakistan (Islam) and Vatican City (Catholic), argue that it is strongly against their religion to use contraception as not only does it degrades women from men, it is against the ‘natural’ law. Humans should have complete control of their body and this leads to pervasive immortality. Despite this, the main reason that contraception is banned in these religions is because the religions don’t believe in sex before marriage; this means the only time for a couple to have sex is for having children and nothing else. Yet, if a couple didn’t want to have a child, preventing pregnancy would be highly unlikely, therefore the birth rate increases. In LIC’s, such as Uganda, the birth rate is 44.17 births per 1000 people and has a fertility rate of 5.96 births per 1000, women working is very rare as they are expected to have many children and on average around 6 in their life time. They are also expected to marry young, from ages like 15 years old, and this leads to a high birth rate for that country. However, in such countries like the UK, the birth rate is 13 and has a fertility rate of 1.90 births per 1000 people. This is because many women have jobs that include working for 9am-5pm in order to improve their quality of life. This delays their time of marriage meaning people tend to marry when they are a little older and having few to no kids; resulting in countries similar to the UK, HICs to have a relatively low birth rate.

Education in particular countries can have a strong affect on birth rate; High Income Countries generally aspire to have high positions in their career and they are also available to such positions, this occurs in countries like the United States of America which has a birth rate of 13.42 births per 1000. This concludes to lower birth rates as concentration would be set on work rather than creating a family in the midst of their careers. However in Low Income Countries such as Mali which holds a birth rate of 45.53 per 1000, opportunities are scarce even if someone desired to work and as there are limited choices, work doesn’t seem something to achieve for in places such as Mali which result in the high birth rates. Another social reason as to why birth rates vary between LIC’s and HIC’s education wise is due to the knowledge and availability of contraception. In the UK, children are taught in their school about sex education and they have the correct knowledge of contraception passed from their teachers, this means that people are aware as to how to prevent pregnancy and this decreases the birth rate whereas in countries such as Niger, having the highest birth rate in the world of 46.12, they have no choice as they either lack contraception such as condoms or, they are unsure as to what they do and how they work.

Another variable which often changes in countries is the death rate. In HIC’s, the death rate is quite low compared to LIC’s. In LIC’s, the death rate is quite high but over time it is falling as a country becomes more economically developed. The main issue which affects the death rate in a country is the standard and provision of health care. The UK has brilliant health care compared to LIC’s such as Zambia. If the UK had such a high quality health care, then the number of people who die from diseases and sicknesses would decrease as the resources for such medical problems would be present and would be able to treat people. The UK spends an average of 9.1% of its GDP on health expenses however there is no ongoing issue in the UK in which people are in fact dying, instead there is a wide range from illnesses to old age. However in Zambia, Pharmaceutical expenditures represented 3.0% of total health expenditures and 0.1% of GDP. However in 2010, government expenditures on health came to 4% of GDP. The factor of health care is vastly linked to the shortage of food and clean water supplies as well as diseases being so