Discuss how and why vital rates may change over time, you should refer to rates such as birth rate, death rate, infant mortality, fertility rate and life expectancy

Vital rates may change over time for many reasons such as stages of development, conflict, government policies and the general evolvement of people. Throughout this answer I will discuss how and why the rates may change and I am going to focus on birth rate, mortality rate and fertility rate to do that. Firstly, birth rate is a major vital rate that fluctuates and changes dramatically depending on the development of a country. Generally, countries in the early stages of the DTM have very high birth rates, this is because there is also a high infant mortality rate and low use of contraception meaning women are more likely to fall pregnant but also they are more likely to experience infant mortality; an example of this is in Gambia the average women will have 7 children in her lifetime and the birth rate is 40 per 1000 but infant mortality is 73 per 1000 meaning that only 33 per 1000 infants survive. In comparison, more developed countries such as the UK and Germany have much lower birth rates. There are many reasons for this such as the emancipation of women, increasing their status meant that women were/are more likely to focus on having careers before settling down to have children. In the early/mid 1900’s this was not the case and the women’s role was some what different so this has created an obvious change in the vital rate due to growing independence of women. Secondly, mortality rates also vary between different countries. Some countries in sub Saharan Africa have the highest mortality rates (20 per 1000). Yet, to many people surprise, the lowest mortality rates can be found in areas that are not necessarily the most developed such as Kuwait (2 per 1000) and Mexico (5 per 1000). Mortality rates can change as a result of conflicts and population. Countries with higher birth rates such as areas in Sub-Saharan Africa will experience high mortality rates because they have poor sanitation and the more people born the more that will die due to it not having a large ageing population. The lowest mortality rates tend to be in areas that have high levels of medical infrastructure where as a lack of post/pre natal care can increase mortality rates quite significantly. In the UK we have a low mortality rate due to good medical care and an ageing population.