I understand that many women will not have kids or will have only one kid, or that child mortality is involved but still a fertility rate of 2 means that ON AVERAGE every woman will have 2 kids. This means that every woman and man will be replaced, including the children that die young if the rate of 2 lasts (the newborn females will also have on average two kids). So why isn’t a fertility rate of 2 enough to replace the population?
In: 701
Two reasons:
The first, which a lot of people have commented on, is because some people die before reaching reproductive age, thus the average acros all woman who have reached reproductive age needs to slightly greater than two to account for these early death.
The second, is because more more men are born than women. The natural ratio is 106 male births for every 100 female births. So for 1 million women to give birth to 1million girls they would need to have 2.06 million babies, or 2.06 births per women.
Combine those two factors gets you to 2.1
It is worth noting that sex selective abortion is bad enough in some places that it is up to 125 or so male births for every 100 female births.
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