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Portugal DEMOGRAPHY
![[PDF]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/pdf.gif)
Figure 6. Estimated Population Distribution by Age and Sex, 2000
Source: Based on information from Grande Enciclopédia
Portuguesa e Brasileira, 9, Lisbon, 1987, 40.
By the early 1990s, Portugal's population was just over
10
million, a little more than triple the 3.1 million
estimated to
live in the country in 1801. The main causes for this slow
growth
were a high infant mortality rate for much of these two
centuries
and an emigration rate so extreme that in one decade, the
1960s,
the country's population actually fell. These trends have
reversed in recent decades. The country's infant mortality
rate
at the beginning of the 1990s--10 per 1,000 in
1992--remained
somewhat higher than the European average but was
one-fifth of
that registered two decades earlier. Emigration also
slowed
markedly as prosperity appeared in Portugal in the second
half of
the 1980s. Moreover, a massive influx of refugees from
former
Portuguese colonies in Africa in the second half of the
1970s
caused a population surge.
Data as of January 1993
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