Here’s the deal with Jamaica’s birth rate: It’s been on a downward spiral for the past couple of decades. Like, seriously declining.
In 2021, they only had about 31,276 live births. Compare that to 2010 when they had 40,508, or even back in 2000 when it was a whopping 56,134 babies popping into the world.
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This whole scoop comes from the Jamaica Population Health Status Report 2000–2022, just dropped in Parliament. It’s put together by the National Epidemiology Branch of the Ministry of Health and Wellness, by the way.
So, their crude birth rate, which basically tells you how many babies are born per 1000 people, dropped a whopping 10.2 points from 2000 to 2022. It went from 21.7 babies per 1000 people to just 11.4 babies.
Now, let’s talk about death. In 2022, they saw about 21,390 folks shuffle off this mortal coil. It hit its peak in 2021, with a staggering 26,974 deaths. And yeah, that was smack in the middle of the COVID-19 mess, but they’re not saying if it was all due to the pandemic.
The crude death rate, which tells you how many deaths per 1000 people, went from about 9.9 in 2021 to 7.8 in 2022.
Oh, and there’s more! The report also spilled the beans on Jamaica’s dependency ratio. In 2019, it was 48.1 per 100 working-age folks. That’s a dip from 2003 when it was 72.7 per 100 working-age peeps.
Now, let’s break down this dependency ratio. You’ve got the child dependency ratio, which is how many kids per 100 working-age adults, and the elderly dependency ratio, which is how many oldies per 100 working-age adults.
Ideally, you want a low dependency ratio, ’cause that means there are more working-age adults who can support the young’uns and the seniors. But get this: In 2019, there were 578,738 kiddos under 15 and only 261,750 seniors over 65. Crazy, right?
But here’s the kicker: From 2000 to 2019, the number of kids dropped by a third, while the number of seniors shot up by over 30%. That’s a wild swing!
