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Spain Size and Growth
In mid-1985, Spain's population reached 38.8 million,
making
it
Western Europe's fifth most populous nation. The country's
population grew very slowly throughout the latter half of
the
nineteenth century and most of the twentieth. In the
1860s, the
population increased by only about one-third of one
percent
annually; by the first decades of the twentieth century,
this
rate of increase had grown to about 0.7 percent per year.
Between
the 1930s and the 1980s, population growth rates hovered
between
0.8 and 1.2 percent annually (see
table 3, Appendix). In
the
postwar years, Spain began to exhibit population growth
patterns
very similar to those of most other advanced industrial
societies. Growth rates were projected to level off, or to
decline slightly, through the remainder of the twentieth
century;
Spain was expected to reach a population of 40 million by
1990
and 42 million by the year 2000. Observers estimated that
the
country's population would stabilize in the year 2020 at
about 46
million.
One significant factor in Spain's population growth has
been
a declining rate of births. Between 1965 and 1985, Spain
experienced a dramatic reduction in its birth rate, from
21 to 13
per thousand, a drop of approximately 38 percent. In 1975,
with
an estimated base population of about 35.5 million, the
country
recorded about 675,000 live births; in 1985, with an
estimated
base population of more than 38 million, Spain had only
about
475,000 live births. In other words, ten years after the
death of
Franco, despite an increase of nearly 3 million in the
base
population, the country registered more than one-third
fewer
births.
Part of this change can be attributed to the increase
in the
percentage of women using contraceptives. Whereas in the
1960s
such data were not even reported, by 1984 the
World Bank (see Glossary)
estimated that over half of Spanish women of
childbearing age practiced birth control. Demographers have
observed,
however, that this increased use of contraceptive devices
was
only the surface reflection of other more significant
changes in
Spanish society during the period from 1960 to 1985. The
economic
causes included an economic slump, unemployment,
insufficient
housing, and the arrival of the consumer society. Also,
changes
in cultural patterns reflected women's increased access to
employment, expanded women's rights, a decline in the
number of
marriages (between 1974 and 1984, the marriage rate
dropped from
7.6 to 5.0 per 1,000), an improved image of couples
without
children, a decline in the belief that children were the
center
of the family, increased access to abortion and divorce,
and in
general a break in the linkage between woman and mother as
social
roles.
At the same time that the birth rate was dropping
sharply,
Spain's low death rate also declined slightly, from 8 to 7
per
1,000. By the mid-1980s, life expectancy at birth had
reached
seventy-seven years, a level equal to or better than that
of
every other country in Europe except France, and superior
to the
average of all the world's advanced industrial countries.
Male
life expectancy increased between 1965 and 1985 from
sixty-eight
to seventy-four years, while female life expectancy rose
from
seventy-three to eighty years.
By the early 1980s, Spain, like all advanced industrial
countries, had begun to experience the aging of its
population
(see
fig. 6). In 1980 a reported 10.6 percent of its
population
was over 65 years of age, a figure that was only a bare
point or
two behind the percentages in the United States and the
Netherlands. By 1986 the percentage over 65 had climbed to
12.2;
officials estimated that by 2001, the percentage over
sixty-five
would exceed 15. In 1985 children under the age of 14
constituted
25 percent of the population; specialists anticipated
that, by
the year 2001, this proportion would decline to 18
percent.
Data as of December 1988
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