Population pyramid for Iran.
It looks like they had a big baby boom 20-30 years ago and then followed that with a sharp reduction in births. What caused this?
The US had baby booms in the past but our baby boom was not this drastic (US pyramid).
Also, here is Iraq for comparison.
The Iranian revolution happened in 1979. I was thinking “revolutionary fervor” (or maybe shortages of birth control) caused it. However, while close, the years don’t line up.
J.
The Iranian revolution happened in 1979. I was thinking “revolutionary fervor” (or maybe shortages of birth control) caused it. However, while close, the years don’t line up.
J.
A bit of a boom (through the 20-30 year-olds, it doesn’t like that much different than the Iraq graph), but it looks to me like the more interesting question is why the ‘baby bust’ in the following years.
One standard answer for reduced birth rate is increased female education. I wouldn’t see the Revolution increasing that (more likely the opposite), so that isn’t the likely answer. Did Iran lose enough population in the Iran/Iraq war to materially affect their population growth?
That was my first thought, but I don’t see a significant drop in male vs female for combatant-age males. The war was in the 80’s, so you’d expect a dip in the male population born around 1960 to 1970 (20 or 30 during the war). I don’t see it.
Instead, starting 20 to 25 years ago, it seems people stopped having many kids. 25 years ago was 1990, about the end of the Iran-Iraq war but the start of the Kuwait invasion. At that point Iran was a pariah state, the military situation in its neighbourhood was volatile, they were being sanctioned. Presumably the economy was the shits and nobody felt they could afford a big family? Yet the Iraqis during the same time, through the Saddam sanctions, shows no such effect. I assume this was because thanks to the shah, Iran had a more educated, urban and modernized population, more likely to control their family size?
Would the shift from rulership by the Shah to the Ayatollah have made a difference? Less exposure to western culture, more staying at home at night with nothing to do but make babies?
See youth bulge. A Google search on those terms gives lots of hits; your answer is likely among them.
But it’s just the opposite - about 20-25 years ago Iranians stopped having as many children, by a significant amount. It’s either the economic climate of the early 90’s (just after the war, sanctions) or it’s something about the 20 to 30 year olds of the time.
If you want to see the multiple effects of history, see this:
Yes, my original question was not well worded. There was a baby boom going on and then a sharp drop in births 15-20 years ago (1995-2000).
I wasn’t aware of any major Iranian events at the time, but I don’t know much about Iran.
The answer is fairly easy. The men who were killed or maimed in the war did not reproduce at the rates that their predecessors did. The shortage of men in this generation means that, i) women who of this generation also reproduced at a lower rate and ii) the shortage of men would hit the workplace as the older ones retired and were not replaced in numbers, leading to the country needing to turn to women of necessity, leading to them having less children.
By the way, the increase in education was mostly under Khomeni.
This Wiki says that “while Iran’s population grew at a rate of more than 3% per year between 1956 and 1986, the growth rate began to decline in the late 1980s and early 1990s after the government initiated a major population control program.” (Italics mine.)
Under “Rafsanjani era and decreasing natality,” it goes on to say that:
There’s a .pdf on the matter here, haven’t read it yet.
Yeah so the paper says:
Haven’t read the whole thing - a bit busy - but the short answer to the OP’s question seems to be, quite simply, that it’s a result of the Iranian government’s 1989 family planning program.
Thanks guys. Interesting stuff.
Sounds like they know how to run a successful contraceptive program.
Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 and they had an 8-year war that ended in 1988. “Half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, with an equivalent number of civilians, are believed to have died, with many more injured” That’s over 1 million dead from Iran alone. Now take the biggest part of the graph, 25-29, let’s round it off to 27. Subtract 27 from 2015 and you get 1988, which is when the Iraq/Iran war ended. So it seems like they had a baby boom after the war.
It seems the revolution did nothing to halt that trend. What’s more, there are now more women studying at Iranian universities than there are men:
You’d be wrong.
[
](Women's rights in Iran - Wikipedia) and that’s just the culmination of a trend started with the Revolution. Iranian women are not as oppressed as you might think.
high-fives MrDibble
But perusing the pyramid, there is no huge difference between male and female population in the 50-year-old (give or take) range. Certainly not enough of a difference to account for the resulting population drop.
Interesting that the relatively conservative government was serious about birth control.
As for educational levels - the shah was determined to make Iran a first world country based on its oil revenue, and was well on his way to achieving that goal. That one reason the fundamentalist church there hated him, modern educated people are less inclined to listen to Mullahs - but of course those same people don’t like secret police either.
The society was well on the way to urbanization and industrialization, a trend difficult for the Mullahs to reverse even if they wanted to. That sort of society sees children as a cost not a benefit.
