Saturday, April 13, 2013

A Droping Fertility Rate or, What Demography Threat?

Reuven notes:

The CIA World Factbook has updated its pages...
The total fertility rate in the area the Factbook calls the West Bank has dropped to 2.91 children born per woman; last year it was 2.98. (Click here, then click on the "People and Society" section to see this year's figure; see here for the historical figures.)

They have also recorded a smaller drop in the fertility rate in Israel: from 2.67 last year to 2.65 this year.

In Gaza, too, it has dropped - from 4.57 to 4.41.

The net result is a narrowing of the fertility gap between Israel and the Palestinian Territories, in particular between Israel and the areas of Judea and Samaria which are now just 0.26 children per mother apart.

I don't know how the CIA gather their figures, or why they differ significantly from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics' figures (which, in 2012, gave a total fertility of 3.00 in Israel), but I assume they're based on on real-life data and not just on mathematical models. As I have noted previously, it's unclear if the World Factbook includes the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria (who have a very high fertility rate) in the West Bank figures or the Israel figures.

See, also, a previous post of his on this. 


Coincidentally, I have just received a new article on this subject:

"What Counts is the Counting:  Statistical Manipulation as a Solution to Israel’s 'Demographic Problem'”
Seven years ago, heightened anxieties in Israel about an Arab threat to Israel’s Jewish majority triggered an influential campaign to change perceptions of who is winning the demographic battle. Proposals to annex 60% or more of the West Bank are based in part on its success in persuading many Israelis and others of the nonexistence of 1 to 1.5 million “missing” Palestinians. This campaign’s estimates of Arab and Jewish population for 2004 and beyond are subjected to close scrutiny, revealing complex but systematic manipulation of data and exposing the political objectives and drastic distortions of the campaign.

Is the CIA manipulating data?

I will read the article and see what I can do.

Stay tuned.

See this recent note.

^

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In scandinavia people think jews have a very strange face, especially the nose is very bad-looking,kinda scythe-like they say, . They call it " Ful nasa". the word "ful" is pronounced like the english word "fuel". i kind of feel sorry for them, but maybe its the testosterone.. i´ve heard it increases the tissues inside the nose, especially bone mass.
It´s intresting to note that the hebrew work "nasa" can mean both "to marry" and "to lift" and "to desire" among many other verbs..