Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
More people gain work in jobs that provide pensions and retirement systems. This lessens
another historic incentive to produce children.
Increasing numbers of women encounter career and educational opportunities that have the
effect of delaying marriage and child-bearing.
Increasingly, husbands and wives consider the costs of raising and educating children and
opt to limit the size of their families.
As a result of the last four factors, the birth rate begins to decline — slowly at first, but then more
rapidly as the modern economy encompasses more and more families. As the gap between death rate
and the birth rate diminishes, the rate of population increase begins to slow, and the curve exhibits
signs of leveling off.
Stage 4: Low stationary
In this final stage birth rates and death rates are
low
and about equal (see Figure 11-5). Thus,
population growth is
stationary
(exhibiting little or no change) because the numbers of births
and deaths are “canceling out” each other. On the map of natural increase (see Figure 11-4),
most countries in the “low” category are experiencing this stage. (Global population as a
whole, as per Figure 11-3, will probably not experience this stage until early in the next cen-
tury.) The characteristics of the low stationary stage are as follows:
Continued improvement and increased availability of health care results in continued
lowering of the death rate.
The economy is overwhelmingly industrial or post-industrial, resulting in diminished need
for manual labor except in those remaining occupations that require a high degree of crafts-
manship.
Institutional retirement systems and benefits are widespread, nullifying the need to have
children for the sake of social security.
Morewomendefermarriageandmotherhood(oroptoutentirely)aseducationalandcareer
opportunities become more widely available and socially acceptable. The effects lower the
birth rate.
Average family size continues to decrease as more families factor in the costs of child rais-
ing and educating children.
