These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: Demography and development: the lessons of Costa Rica.
    Author: Gallagher CF.
    Journal: Am Univ Field Staff Rep North Am; 1980; (16):1-14. PubMed ID: 12311943.
    Abstract:
    Focus in this discussion is on demography and development in Costa Rica. In a 15-year period, during the 1960s and the 1st years of the 1970s, Costa Rica achieved the fastest and steepest fertility decline yet recorded in Latin America. The crude birthrate dropped from a high point in 1959 of 48.3/1000 to a low of 29.9/1000 in 1973. During the same period, the death rate declined from 9.2/1000 to 5.2/1000 by 1973. Because of this, the drop in the rate of natural increase, from 3.9% a year in 1959 to 2.47% in 1973, was not quite as pronounced in percentage terms. During those same years infant mortality dropped from 74/1000 to about 45/1000. The total fertility rate declined from 7.3 children in 1960 to 5.5 in 1968 and to just above 4 children in 1973. The major thrust of the decline originated primarily in popular perception of the imbalance between an unnecessarily high birthrate and changed socioeconomic conditions toward the end of the 1950s, of which improvements in health and general social care were among the most influential. It is not so much the economic performance of Costa Rica that distinguishes it from its neighbors as its social condition. What keeps Costa Rica from being a "banana republic" is its comparatively much higher level of social indicators: newspaper circulation per capita and the amount of newsprint consumption, the extraordinary number of bookstores in San Jose, the number of physicians and hospital beds per person, the number of teachers and students enrolled at all levels of education, and its extremely low mortality rate and very high longevity. The total fertility rate appears to have entered a period of stagnation or pause, with virtually no decline since 1974 and even a slight increase since 1976. In the 5-year period since 1973, the decline through 1978 amounted to only 5%. In the preceding 1968-73 period it wasmore than 26%. The number of births/1000 women in the 15-19 year old age group remains constant and is comparatively very high. The age specific statistics that are presented fail to give any indication as to why the recent stagnation has occurred, or whether it is a passing or a long term phenomenon. The following possible explanations, which are grouped into 3 categories, are reviewed: those relating to reproductive behavior itself, policy issues, and the role of socioeconomic influences. In the area of reproductive behavior, the evidence indicates that Costa Ricans still want a fairly large family. It needs to be clarified that the Costa Rican government has never had and does not now have a program designed primarily to reduce natality. With regard to development problems, the most marked feature in the Costa Rican panorama is its internal imbalance. The social aspects of development have been given more attention than the economic.
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]