Key Issue #2

Over the past few centuries, every country in the world has been increasing dramatically. This is causing the entire population of the world to grow at an alarming pace. The reason for this increase is because the crude birth rate is higher than the crude death rate. This is caused by an increase in medical knowledge that causes people to live longer and become more aware of different diseases. The natural increase rate in most countries has been increasing because of this relationship between the crude birth rate and the crude death rate. Over the past 50 years the doubling rate for most countries has increased their population by 4 times what they originally were in 1950! This is because the infant mortality rate in most of these countries is extremely high because of their medical knowledge. The only country out of the six countries in the graph that doesn't have a high life expectancy is Africa. However, the reason why their population is increasing is because of the total fertility rate on the continent. Most people in Africa still want a large family to increase the odds of one of their children to living on to adulthood. Most of the countries in Africa have a lack of medical knowledge that most of the world has today. This causes their life expectancy to drastically shrink and was and still is a huge problem in Africa.

Life Expectancy

Overview of Life Expectancy

By Matt Rosenberg

Jun 14 2010

Life expectancy from birth is a frequently utilized and analyzed component of demographic data for the countries of the world. It represents the average life span of a newborn and is an indicator of the overall health of a country. Life expectancy can fall due to problems like famine, war, disease and poor health. Improvements in health and welfare increase life expectancy. The higher the life expectancy, the better shape a country is in.
As you can see from the map, more developed regions of the world generally have higher life expectancies (green) than less developed regions with lower life expectancies (red). The regional variation is quite dramatic.
However, some countries like Saudi Arabia have very high GNP per capita but don't have high life expectancies. Alternatively, there are countries like China and Cuba that have low GNP per capita have reasonably high life expectancies.
Life expectancy rose rapidly in the twentieth century due to improvements in public health, nutrition and medicine. It's likely that life expectancy of the most developed countries will slowly advance and then reach a peak in the range of the mid-80s in age. Currently, microstates Andorra, San Marino, and Singapore along with Japan have the world's highest life expectancies (83.5, 82.1, 81.6 and 81.15, respectively).
Unfortunately, AIDS has taken its toll in Africa, Asia and even Latin America by reducing life expectancy in 34 different countries (26 of them in Africa). Africa is home to the world's lowest life expectancies with Swaziland (33.2 years), Botswana (33.9 years) and Lesotho (34.5 years) rounding out the bottom.
Between 1998 and 2000, 44 different countries had a change of two years or more of their life expectancies from birth and 23 countries increased in life expectancy while 21 countries had a drop.