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Finland DEMOGRAPHY
Unavailable
Figure 9. Population by Age and Sex, 1986
Source: Based on information from Nordic Council of Ministers, Nordic
Statistical Secretariat, Yearbook of Nordic Statistics, 1987,
Copenhagen, 1988, 22.
Unavailable
Figure 10. Population Density by Province, 1981
Source: Based on information from Federal Republic of Germany, Statistisches
Bundesamt, Länderbericht Finnland, 1986, Wiesbaden, 1986, 8.
Finland had 250,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth
century. As
a result of wars, the population did not reach the 1
million mark
until 1810 (see
table 7, Appendix A). Mortality remained
high
even in the nineteenth century. The famine of 1867 to
1868, for
example, killed 5 percent to 10 percent of the population,
and it
was not until 1880 that there were 2 million Finns. In the
last
part of the century, improved living conditions began to
lower
the death rate, but a simultaneous fall in the birth rate
and
increased emigration retarded growth. As a result, shortly
before
World War I the country's inhabitants still numbered only
3
million. A short-lived "baby boom" in the first five years
after
the upheavals of World War II allowed the population to
reach 4
million by 1950. Since then the country's population
growth has
been among the lowest in the world. Low birth rates
coupled with
heavy emigration resulted in a population of only
4,937,000 in
1987. The annual birth rate since the early 1970s has
averaged
fewer than 14 births per 1,000 persons, a rate that has
caused
demographers to estimate that Finland's population would
peak at
just under 5 million by about the turn of the century,
after
which it would decline.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Finland's average
population
density fourteen persons per square kilometer, was the
second
lowest in Western Europe, just behind Norway's, thirteen
and
ahead of Sweden's seventeen. Actual population density
varied
widely, however
(see
fig. 9, 1981). The province of
Lapland,
covering 29.3 percent of the nation's area but containing
only
about 4 percent of its population, had a population
density of
about 2 persons per square kilometer, making it one of the
earth's emptiest regions. Uusimaa, Finland's second
smallest
province, which contains the capital city, Helsinki,
accounted
for only 3.1 percent of the national territory; however,
it was
home for more than 20 percent of the country's
inhabitants, who
lived together at a density of 119 per square kilometer, a
figure
identical to that of Denmark. The provinces of Kymi, Hame,
and
Turku ja Pori in south-central Finland, which had a mix of
rural
and urban areas with economies based on both agriculture
and
industry, were perhaps more truly representative of
Finnish
conditions. During the 1980s, their population densities
ranged
from thirty to forty persons per square kilometer.
Data as of December 1988
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