Hanoi, 2 December 2005 – At a workshop held by the General Statistics Office (GSO) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Hanoi organized to release the results of the 2005 Population Change Survey, it was announced that the fertility rate had reached replacement level. The replacement level corresponds to a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 2.1.
Results of the survey show that the TFR for the 12 months prior to the survey date, i.e., from 1/4/2004 – 31/3/2005, was 2.1 children per woman. This level is much lower than that for all countries in Southeast Asia (2.7) but higher than that of Singapore (1.3) and Thailand (1.7).
Other findings show that while fertility in Viet Nam continues to decline, it is doing so more slowly and with less fluctuations. This is a tendency observed in many countries, where fertility has declined to replacement level.
The survey found that fertility levels are not the same across the country. Regionally, TFR is much higher in the Central Highlands (3.1) than in the Southeast (1.7). This difference is more pronounced drastic from province to province: from 3.9 in Kon Tum down to 1.5 in Ho Chi Minh City. There was also not a big difference between rural (2.3) and urban areas (1.7).
The results show that there has been only a very slight increase in the proportion of mothers giving birth to a third child or higher in comparison with 2004 (20.8% vs. 20.2%). However, this slight increase was due to a rapid decline in the number of women having one or two children rather than an increase in the number of women having more than two children.
For the country as a whole, the Crude Death Rate (CDR) for the 12 months preceding the survey date of 1 April 2005 was 5.3 per thousand population and Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) was 17.8 per thousand live births, both lower than the estimates from the previous year’s survey. The IMR has significantly declined in recent years but remains relatively high in three mountainous regions: Northwest, Northeast and Central Highlands.
The workshop also made public several other indices, including a Crude Birth Rate (CBR) of 18.6 per thousand and a Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) of 76.8%. Most interesting is that CPR of modern methods reached 65.7% – the highest level so far. Experts agreed that this may be the key factor contributing to the above-mentioned continued fertility decline.
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