Assignment #5 Simon Fossheim

To find out if Catholic prohibition has an influence on birth rates around the world, I have selected 6 countries with a percentage of catholic citizens above 65% in a random order from different parts of the world. These countries are Belgium, Portugal, France, Porto Rico, Columbia and Ireland. I have also selected 3 countries where the percentage of Catholicism is below 5% of the countries population. I have compared the birth rate of these countries, and also added more variables (Life expectancy, Infant mortality, Literacy, poverty and average GDP per capita) to see if there is other variables that could effect the rate of birth.

First, I would say that having a limit of only 9 countries would not be a representative selection for this analysis. After analyzing the different countries, I found that most of the countries from both the catholic countries and the non-Catholic countries hade very similar birth rates, and I can see that religion is not the most obvious variable that influence the birth rate. In fact, the country with the highest birth rate was a country from the non-Catholic category, and the country with the lowest birth rate was a country of the catholic category. In addition, the average birth rates of the non-Catholic countries were in fact higher than the catholic countries. 

Catholic:         (10.03+9.76+12.7+11.3+17.23+15.81) / 6 = 12.805

Non-Catholic:  (10.8+13.23+24.22) / 3 = 16.083

By looking at the other variables, I can see that the two countries with the highest birth rate (Columbia* and Egypt*) have a very low percentage of literacy compared to the others, they had the highest scores of infant mortality, they have the lowest GDP per capita, and they had among the highest percentage of the population falling below the poverty line (behind Puerto Rico).

In Conclusion; based on the findings in this analysis of these 9 countries I would say that religion does not have an effect on the rate of birth, and that the wealth of the country (GDP+ and poverty-) and education (literacy+) are more effective variables. This could be a result of the security and value of family in poor societies. Furthermore I would say that these results are limited in the sense that there could be other variables, which is not included here, and that the selection for this analysis is limited to only 9 countries. Despite this limitation I conclude here that the Catholic prohibition of birth control seem to have a low impact on birth rates, and that this prohibition may not follow through in behavior.

 Resources: 

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-01.pdf

By Simon Fossheim