Fertility, morbidity and mortality

Demographers measure fertility (births), mortality (deaths) and morbidity (illness) with rates that must be read carefully. The crude birth rate counts births per 1000 population, but it is crude because it ignores age structure: a young population has more births even with the same fertility behaviour. Better measures focus on women of childbearing age (general fertility rate) or sum age-specific rates (total fertility rate, TFR: the children a woman would have if she lived through all childbearing ages at current rates). Worked example: if age-specific fertility rates sum to 2.1 children per woman across five-year groups (each rate already scaled), the TFR is 2.1 — roughly replacement level.