Average crude birth rates for selected MS since 1800

The crude birth rate is the real number of live births in a year per 1 000 inhabitants. (Various European MS are included in the average, starting in the first year for which data is available: Denmark, Finland, France, Sweden from 1800; Belgium, 1830; UK, 1838; Spain, 1858; Ireland, 1864; Portugal, 1886; Italy, Netherlands, 1900.)
Europe and other parts of the developed world have been undergoing a ‘demographic transition’ since the 19th century. Falling mortality rates due to improvements in food supply and public health in the 1800s were followed at the end of that century by a steady decline in birth rates. This decline was interrupted after the Second World War by a ‘baby boom’, but since the 1970s it has resumed or even become steeper in most industrialised countries.